Fear of Trust: ODYGYA

Valentin Gabriel Nițu

Fear of Trust - ODYGYA

Copyright © 2022 by Valentin Gabriel Nițu

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

First edition

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Contents

1. Eris - Ballerina

2. Eris - Rat head

3. Eris - It bothers me

4. Söt kaffe - Three siblings and two mothers - Brotherly love

5. A brief morning

6. A brother

7. Happy Family

8. Bitter Taste

9. The first cup of coffee

10. A second cup of coffee

11. Feelings and toothpicks

12. The toothpick palace

13. It used to be a toothpick palace

14. Electryo

15. Concordia

16. ODYGYA

1

Eris - Ballerina

An eerie, ringing echo of a car horn in the mist of this fine morning of July, amidst the slowly fading waves of rising fume behind the window, like the steaming air…

…Waltzing over a cup of coffee laid alonely on this table before me…

…Jolts me awake for a second as it sends my heart racing..

Yet the echo drowned as well…

As did the…

…clarity… my mind – it hurts me to think the way I’d want to think.

Because whenever this story gets going, I feel like something’s pulling my body away…

It’s like deep in my soul there’s a quiet, subtle crying, and the trembling… of the shed tears sends me back to sleep. But I have a hard time falling asleep. Quite at odds, I stay awake.

So, what is this?…

I’m confused…

⁂

What is Karina doing here?

And who is… this?…

It hurts.

Let me go!

I want to come back,

Samantha!

⁂

…

This is bad… I’m falling asleep.

But I don’t want to!

…but how soft and cozy it feels

…to have her breath on my cheek…

Karina…

How comfortable…

…and how sweet

is the unspoiled smile… of an orphan.

"Regard everything in the opposite way and you shall only find the truth"

We found ourselves in the 17th of September. Up from the small and misty house at the back of town, to see my old man, hidden by a thin olive straw hat, strolling along, greeting me just as my friend greeted my comrades at the power station: confidently and sweet.

We’ve been down this cruel road for so long – long enough that our holidays have crumbled on top of each other. Now we never make it to anything anymore. The bus stations are always the same: three or four women, scantily clad, sitting cross-leggedly, and other dozens of children, teenagers and grey-haired men with their suits wearing dust down the boulevard, walking past them.

The Belgian air is suffocating, but there’s also the morning coffee scent and this sort of timid figure of nostalgia that’s crossing the long, cold and dark pavements which you can find before the dawn.

I have kept myself unyielding. So far, this nonsense has never pushed me into abandoning myself. Those who appeal to the superficial teasing of the human nature are nothing but susceptible weaklings.

A decade has almost passed now since I began standing by the Wouters Family. I’ve aided and I’ve sealed issues where it seemed unlikely. I’ve observed and passed it all to Ms. Olivia, to Mr. Johannes. And then I kept quiet where it was needed, since, in principle, family remains family. But recently I’ve been introduced to the terrible error which I was making.

The blood actually does make the family. The blood that gives birth, and the blood that results in death; it’s all part of what bonds us. There is no real place for outsiders, for those who want to partake. There’s always this tendency of having more doubts and hatred for those like me.

The blood justifies itself; this is what my dear friend, and also the husband of Ms. Olivia – Nicholas Wouters – had told me.

I aspired to believe that it’d approximate something different. I thought that it was a means of justifying vengeance – an eye for an eye, or nobody gets away with anything -, but now I realized that it means so much more than that.

Even though it seemed stupid, or implausible, I’ve done my best to bond and join in. I’ve witnessed many of this family’s atrocities, and in the end, the one that punishes me gets to be my own self. Because I have been the Wouters family’s hopes, and soul, and afterthought, but then also its terrible disappointment.

My biggest regret is not the fact that it came down to this cold tombstone – embalmed with smells of lilies and jasmine – but the fact that insofar as my greedy, obsessive search of truth manifested itself throughout the years, every bit of my frustration never reached the outsides of my mind – this metal box which I kept for a better future. I could’ve done much more than this. Yet, I didn’t.

This day is not a welcomed one, my dear Ephil. From now on I won’t be able to see you, other than through vague and fictitious dreams. I’d be disappointed if you ever actually take my death into account, but someday or another, you will get to the point where you’ll ask for my fate, and you’ll wish for my place in this blue cemetery where your father has brought me, and maybe, with or without your own will, you will be the one to lift the gun barrel up by your temples, in order for your family to disappear. And with that final act, perhaps the mess that your family had left behind will also get dispelled…

Yours, young man, Thomas D."

(I see it…)

From within the insides of the thick brick fence, inside the courtyard, the rooftop’s bright and hallucinatory, reflecting the light of a harsh and heavy sun down the old and forlorn roadway from the Belgian small city’s hill. In the middle of the yard, old willow branches reach far and almost above Ms. Wouters’ vines and terracotta pathway, both of which stretch from one house’s corner to another, all the way to the backyard pavilion. Once the wind strips this frame off its long and shining boughs, a woman appears at the entrance, stepping in with her white high-heels, her cotton dress and hat, sort of like a baby dandelion that detached itself from its rightful place, just floating around, aimlessly. She walks up the short marble steps before the entrance door and carries in a purple bag. There was a hoarse and faint and heavy voice coming from the inside of the house, but she couldn’t understand what the voice said.

Once she gets inside and feels the cold and gruesome air that originates in the darkened corners of the rooms which align themselves down the right and the left side of the hallway, at the bottom of the staircase she notices the bruised and faded body of the old man, Aleksander, leaning on the handrail. She looked down and away from Aleksander for a moment, and went into the kitchen to drop the bag.

Soon after, Aleksander found himself being carried back into his room. But his legs get weak:

Let me die. Now she heard the voice clearly.

The woman helped him lie down on the hard mattress, by the small window in his room. She pitied the old man.

It’s been over a week now since you started telling me this sort of things. If your son will come here and hear you talking like this, there’ll be a fight. And I’m not going to be in town when such scandals are announced like this; you know very well that I just can’t stand the feeling… she said, as she dipped a handkerchief into cold water.

Then, through the window, she saw her young boy lying down on the grass. She notices that he’s not moving, and immediately puts the handkerchief into the old man’s hand, hurrying out in the backyard.

The woman’s shouts sounded clear, like water streams wheezing down from a spring. Yet through the mind of the teenager, the voice was merely an echo: his reality was far foreseen.

The clouds above, on the blue sky, within the reflection of the boy’s brown eyes, moved like a ballerina, and through his nostrils the fresh autumn air filled his lungs as his breaths seemed to go deep and long, into the ground below him.

The boy was living in a world of his own. He was chatting and joking with the storm that was approaching somewhere from the horizon.

The truth is that no teenager settles for one world, and that they’re always looking for another. And the reality is never enough for those like us, who seek happiness, who seek an ideal, an absolute state of accomplishment. Perhaps a family would suffice for most of us. Perhaps only someone whom we may consider family would suffice.

Others like us are in the search of love, and not necessarily of a family, thus they always look for partners to seduce, because we love to feel ourselves, but others like us as well, like masters of the world, and this sentiment, when your brain is drowning in endorphins, until all the „love" dries out, remains for those like us an ideal. Some of us – one officially unrecognized minority – realize that everything that’s subjective is also relative, and insufficiently important to be considered an ideal. Anyways, their ideal is to be illuminated, to be at peace with everything, because only then death – the absolute fear – would evaporate from within us and would only be reflected in our past. And life would have no meaning; the ideal would be then comprised in the lack of an ideal.

„You mean that life only has direction, and not meaning? But then, if nothing makes sense, then what would all of this mean? Like… What causes causality…? – I almost can hear her, right here with me, as I lay down on the bed, covered, under the blankets. I mean, I can imagine her dancing in the locked room, with the moves of a ballerina, with one hand holding a liquor bottle, and with the other, a little hookah; everything starts moving in a peculiar way and thereafter, in a flash, entices me into falling in a kind of superficial happiness. What would have happened if I was dead at that moment? If mom would have shouted my name, but my body wouldn’t flinch? It bothers me that, all this time, my family’s still in Sweden, and also that which made me flinch in that exact moment, the same old… ballerina. But now I am firmly convinced that she will stay faithful to that melody, the one that even now, perhaps, is making her smile.

My mother was wearing a white dress that day, and a cotton dawn-colored hat. I can remember that, but not (at least now) why I was lying down in the grass, with my eyes pointing at the sky.

She made me lean against the chair’s backrest, by my dad’s desk upstairs, and she brought me, on two separate plates which she had placed on a green handle-less metal tray, fragments of bread dipped in milk and cocoa, and a cup of spearmint tea (grandpa Aleka’s garden). That cup of tea was a first for me, because I didn’t want to drink any until then. I hardly remember – it’s a sort of fogy memory I keep coming back to –, but there was this white lamp on that desk where my mother had placed me, and its light seemed to sort of follow mom’s trace as she made her way to exit the room, such that it sort of faded away from me, as soon as that door closed. It felt a bit nauseating.

The quick steps of a cat or a mouse, coming from the rooftop or the attic, were frightening for me and so I couldn’t take a bite of what mother had brought me.

Those steps still echo throughout time, back to the night before, and not from above my head, but from the next room, from above Ms. H’s old and crappy wooden floor. At that time, I was on a couch and holding above my mouth the slim end of a Limoncello bottle. I was sipping it as my eyes were pointed up at the ceiling, and with my legs tense. My sweaty hands, and my boiling forehead – due to all the steam coming from their obscure bathtub – I was feeling like I was trying in vain to kill myself, tying around my neck the superficial chains of delectation, of euphoria, of endorphins, of that skin so soft, that those droplets of gratification, sliding down her breasts, were tantamount to any other liquor for me.

There was no difference between what made me shiver, between the icy movements stationed vertically on my back, and the suffocating, sweaty air, rising up towards the ceiling. Consequently, I was only facing that flour and lemon covered couple of lips.

Before I could figure, the next day had me lying down in my backyard, in the tiny pebbles, in the wet sand, watching the upcoming storm, and the joyous tiny clouds above my house - which symbolized a sort of introduction for what was to follow. And mother was grabing on my arm and checking if it had a pulse.

Dad, I know, had been away that night, as always, so I just stayed in his room and slept the night there. But I could not fall asleep right away, but instead I lied on the bed, again with my eyes at the ceiling, listening to the hoarse coughs of my grandfather, coming from the inside of his room.

After that, as I was gazing through the window, Gouvy seemed to be an actual giant.

I felt safe in my father’s room, as if I was a parrot in a cage, placed on a pedestal, but then everything turned up to be so relative, as I was imagining myself lying down, breathless, in the sand outside, still.

For that I couldn’t sleep in those moments, my mind was filled with dozens of passing superficial thoughts. This way, I could ignore my grandpa’s snoring.

I tried to structure the image of my father. But I realized that the image was fading through the gap between his social figure and his occupations. My only connection to my dad’s job has been related to the instants of farewell, when I’d follow him down the terracotta alley and see him leaving to work in a dark-blue corvette, and so I encountered a little bit of shock when I looked around the room and counted dozens of weird wooden sculptures, hundreds of miniature objects - part of a large collection of his, I suppose.

I forgot, or perhaps I never knew who my father is. And so, who can know what’s going on inside his head when he leaves us.

The truth is that, by spending that time in my father’s room, questioning things the way I did, the safety that