The Big Water

The wall

We still didn’t know anything about the wall then. About the mornings in the Home, about the wake-ups, about dreaming in this accursed place. In the beginning, the wall wasn’t noticeable. Our heads were still swimming, intoxicated with the sparkling, moist air from the water. I do not have to remind you of the rapturous, wondrous hours of happiness we spent that night by the Big Water. Curse me, the Big Water was a beautiful dream. I always believed in fiction.

The wall was all around the Home, like a serpent. Huge. It embraced you, it wrapped you up in its tail and then, nothing could save you. Oh God, those black mornings full of dread next to the wall. Silence. It seemed each morning it consumed one child. The image of the mornings in the Home remains as one of the scariest in my life. All along the wall you could see boys lined up, boys who had been woken too early, still with troubled dark dreams, bleary-eyed, blue from the cold and trembling. Most of the children were barefoot, not dressed warmly enough, each wearing whatever he had arrived in. To get away from the ice of the early mornings (God, how the frosty dew could bite), they did stupid exercises, indifferently stamping the ground, one-two, left-right, up-down; just enough to warm up your soul. Curse me, a soul. The soul felt the coldest; our souls were ice. The children were usually silent, with strange, big eyes, sick, with a dark flame, little heads bowed, as though they were looking for something that was lost on the ground. Usually they would stand like that, heads down, for hours, like young, slender flowers whose stems were broken by a harsh wind and which had now wilted (but maybe it was from hunger too). This was most noticeable with the little girls. Curse me, our beautiful girls! Hair shorn off, limping, like ugly little boys, diminished, melted into the line. Curse me, someone had thought up an assembly line for the beautiful girls.

Fear spread all around, unknown fear. Even to this day I still tremble with fear when I see homes for children; I think they still have that deafness, that silence, that dead quiet. The fear had entered every child, every object. The devastation and poverty was such that you couldn’t know whether the war had ended or still continued. I can still see the children bent over like old people, children who swallow air with difficulty and let out the same air with even greater difficulty, children who don’t run but who drag themselves through the dust, children who hardly open their mouths once in a day. Sometimes it lasted for days, sometimes for weeks, sometimes the image would stay for months. Day and night. Mute children, curse me, dumbly looking at the wall. But really nothing could be done. You know you are built in by the wall. You don’t have anywhere to go, you are separated from the other world. Curse me, you’re built in on all sides.

The wall seems to get bigger. It looked so high, as if it was built to keep out the birds. Some of the children measured it with spans, to the millimetre. Curse me, to the last millimetre. Usually before the assembly, in his spare time, some boy had thought to measure the wall. Certainly in despair; curse me, it had no meaning. It was as if the devil had nothing else to do, all at once, all the measuring provoked a variety of disagreements. Someone would interrupt you when you were measuring, would confuse you and you would have to start again. Oh God, not because it was so important, but all the wretchedness had to come out somewhere. Usually, one weak boy would grab the throat of an even weaker boy so the fight would be finished to the end. However mindless this sounds, the measurement and re-measurement in time became one of our dearest past times. Such a confusion of numbers that there wasn’t a soul alive who could sort it all out. Altogether different dimensions came out of it all, some said the height was such and such; according to others, the height was something else. Yet others spoke aloud the measurements they had made, in their sleep; it was incredible, horrible, everything was in a muddle. Even so, each one well knew for himself how high the wall was. When the administration found out we were spending our time so mindlessly, that we carried our notebooks in our hands to disguise what we were doing, they immediately banned everyone from walking near the wall, and everyone who tried to measure the wall again got the strictest punishment. Curse me, the strictest.

The wall had its own history, it hid something evil from the past. I swear, it hid all of the restlessness of those who had been locked in here before, I think it excited us with a particular power. The strange and indecipherable signs left by the “predecessors” as we named the lunatics who were there before us (fifteen to sixteen of them, probably the last ones, the others having fled immediately after the war and returned to normal life), curse me, those signs planted fear in our bones. It was obvious they weren’t joking, there was a constant threat that they would appear, that they would jump from the wall, as though their restless sick souls were pressed into the wall. It was as if they could come back at any time, curse me, that they are watching you. Their shadows were present, alive. But the most frightening thing was that some of the signs displayed a clear human conscience, a mind. Curse me, you could see heart, a gentle look, things that made you feel warm. Maybe all of that was created in a shining moment, there, in that moment, shivering, they confirmed their existence on the wall, their human life, they “immortalised” themselves, just like the traveller who set off to be a guest worker, on the road, in a thousand places, on trees, on rock, on metal road signs, you see he has written his name. Curse me, his human name. As if those big, hungry eyes could be understood differently. Clever eyes, full of brilliance. Blue. Same as the sky, curse me, like the sky. Just about everything that was in colour was blue. Blue dominated on the wall. Only God knows how the lunatics came to blue, but it was known that it served them as a useful cure. Those who had had the chance to see the lunatics at work, how they etched with colour day and night, told how at those times the lunatics behaved totally normal, like human beings. Our bell-ringer, comrade Aneski, one of the previous inmates of this Home, in his moments recalled all of that in a very lively way, and what was most strange was he always started to speak about this himself, without any greater reason, he would say:

“Lunatics, being lunatics, are not normal.” He would say “Give them a little paint and they would forget everything, for days they would forget about eating, about sleeping. Give them paint and they wouldn’t pester you for anything else. They would become gentle as lambs. Lunatics!”

There were times, after long observation (maybe that was darkness, twilight), when all of the signs merged into one universal image. Then, a whole sea would roar before our eyes. Curse me, a sea. You see a storm over the wall, waves which had risen to the skies; bewitched birds with wings spread wide, a scream, some human voices, the drowned, hell. The children would go mad one by one, see how quickly they disappear. They hide like mice, everywhere in the Home. You’d think some bad wind had got into the Home and struck the children, had pursued them. Curse me, nothing could bring them to their senses. That fear, that bitterness was overwhelming. In any case, that was a delusion and not a lot of time passed before the wall was whitewashed and all over its surface we wrote slogans in red. At first, those slogans didn’t remind us of anything, they were unnecessary, big red bugs. Curse me, red bugs. But later they meshed completely with the life of the Home.

I don’t know for how many ages we were imprisoned in the building that carried the impressive name “Shining Light”. But I swear, a person with the best vision soon had to see a doctor for loss of sight. Some, you know, went blind, curse me, it was blindness. Later, it turned out it was a rare form of blindness, a type of blindness that couldn’t be cured with the wearing of glasses. And strangest of all and in the beginning, hardest to understand, was the fact the building itself was transformed into a wall. All of the windows from which you could see the Big Water were bricked in. Curse me, bricked. They explained that all of it was done on noble inspiration. Curse me, all people are adorned with noble inspiration and we will die from such things! Blind, without seeing each other. Curse me, blind. Honestly, that was a whole tale. The windows that faced the lake were bad places, it was where the watery spirits got in, to wake the people. From there, each day, someone would jump. Investigations showed it always came after some subconscious behaviour, in a moment of powerful excitement, inflamed by the deceptive voice of the spirit. They were misled by the water’s spirits, they thought they could fly. Curse me, where would they fly, the windows were high, just about up to the ceiling, and the hope to survive was none at all. There wasn’t one who got up off the ground if he’d tried flying through the window. And who didn’t want to try at least once. Just that, to fly once. Not caring where he’d fall, not caring from what height he’d throw himself or how long his life would last. And then, there were so many times when it was very much all the same, curse me, very much so. The risk was the same whether you flew or remained.

The wall everywhere, all around, the wall above all, was in the Home. Curse me, the wall.

Only somewhere far away was there a freedom, a big water which couldn’t be built in by any wall.

“Here,” said the son of Kejtin one morning and started to laugh, happy laughter, from the heart. Curse me, that was when it happened for the first time, she spoke to us. I swear, the wall couldn’t do anything to the water, she thundered. We heard. She was coming. Curse me, she was coming, even over the wall.

The image of the Big Water can never be lost. It was as though she, together with the yearning for the Senterlev Mountain, achieved real meaning, as though this wondrous magical dream were possible, could materialise in some way. The Big Water is unattainable, she has to be in the heart of a person. In his dream. Curse me, for the whole time we were in the Home I don't recall I wanted anything else from life. Like the dearest thing; like the face of my mother I kept her deep in my heart. I didn't even talk to the son of Kejtin about that, you couldn't talk to anyone about that, I thought. It was magic. A dream. I would never exchange that great, free water, not for everything in this world. Curse me, I wouldn't give her for anything, even though she was the sole cause of those and later sufferings, mine and Kejtin’s. And happiness, don't forget. A person who has travelled such a hard, humiliating road has to know the value of that impoverished, little muscle, the human heart. I swear, only our love divided into a thousand atoms, shared with the others, what you’ve given to others, that is all you have, that is where meaning is. Come on, then, let’s give our blood to those who are our brothers, our eternal confirmation. Oh, let’s hurry. The lunatic bell-ringer is striking his bell, every dream is cut short. Crazy, blind running, down dark, narrow stairs — Everyone in line! Everyone line up!