After everything I saw him go through last autumn, after the CONDITION I saw him in, I’m finding it hard to breathe, as if someone has me by the throat and is squeezing it tight, strangling me. It’s my turn to cover my face with my hands. The world is spinning out of control and I have absolutely nothing to hold on to; my family is gone, and, after this, Alex will be gone too. He hates violence. As far as he’s concerned, there is nothing worse.
His hands are covered in blood... It’s dripping from his wrists, soaking into the dirt by his feet. As if in a trance, I’m unable to look away. And it is in this moment that I suddenly realize I would topple the world for just a drop of this blood. Anything to stop it flowing from his body.
With shaking hands, I pull the silk scarf from around my neck and hold it out to him.
‘Why?’ he asks. ‘For the last three months or for your family?’
And, looking him in the eye, I reply, ‘Both...’
‘Someone had to cut the bloody cord!’ he shouts coldly and spits out some blood. It’s in his mouth, on his lips, his chin, his neck – it’s everywhere.
I am horrified at how much damage I’ve done. It’s as though my hand broke free and decided to deliver retribution all by itself.
‘I needed the last three months to get a divorce,’ he continues. ‘Hannah prepared for it well. She managed to cobble together enough incriminating photographs that any judge, male or female, would have left me with nothing. Could you live with me in a shack?’
I am shocked. All this time he was getting a divorce and he couldn’t call? Write? Explain? I have neither the strength nor the desire to find out. There is only one thing I need to know: ‘Do you honestly doubt it?’
I take the scarf from him and press it gently to his lips. Dampening it, I start cleaning the blood off carefully and, as if it knows that it’s useless to argue with me, it submits, and his nose stops bleeding.
The whole time my hands are busy with his face, correcting what they’ve done, Alex stares at me intensely, probably thinking what a fool I am. And all I can think is that everything repeats itself: I broke him, and I put him back together again. I made him bleed and I also stopped him bleeding. For the very first time, the thought enters my shock-addled brain that I have a certain power over this man, although it will be a while before I understand how to use it.
CHAPTER 2. Changes, or Starting Point No. 2
*** ‘I Don’t Deserve You’ by Plumb ***
Everything happens so quickly that there’s little time to digest it all. It feels as if I’m in a convertible, tearing along the highway of my life at full speed, and my head is about to get blown off.
It takes Alex just three days to obtain a divorce for me and Timothy in court, something that would take most people months or even years. On day four, we get married and I take his last name. There is one reason, and one reason only, for all the hurry: my children urgently need U.S. visas. People mention sums of money and Alex pays them. The only thing he asks about are time frames, which he gets halved. No one argues with him, cowed by his determination, and I’m horrified to see how quickly people’s fates can be decided when there’s money involved. Everything can be bought: honor, virtue, even a family with children.
The thing that leaves the deepest cut in my heart, however, is how my new husband treats my former one: Alex takes Timothy’s children away by pushing every button at the same time. He says he’ll find a way to get them out of the country with or without their father’s consent and that Timothy is well aware of this fact. It is just a question of time and money, and only the former matters to Alex because it is limited. In return for voluntarily signing an agreement allowing his children to leave the country, Alex offered to help Timothy get a U.S. visa and a job in Seattle, near to us so that he can see his son and daughter whenever he wants. What really hits home, however, is the promise that Danny and Sonia will obtain the best education in the world and be given every possible opportunity. The situation breaks the man I have lived with for the past twelve years. Tim looks so wretched that I want to drown myself just to silence my remorse.
Although I’m not there when the conversation takes place, I know virtually everything that was said because Timothy told me afterwards. He is horrified by the man I am going to live with, the man who will fill the role of father to our children: Alex has ploughed through our family, my feelings, and the feelings of those I love and, like a frog in a specimen jar, I have just stared out feebly and watched it all happening. Every decision has been made for me and without me, I just signed on the dotted line. It is not surprising that Alex has managed to get so rich, people behave differently with him: the obstinate agree, the brave chicken out, and the indecisive make up their minds.
In just a week, my children have U.S. visas in their passports, while mine has been valid since September. Alex tells me to take only essentials – I can buy clothes and what not in the States – and, like a zombie, I simply do what he says.
Just before we go, we drop by my parents so that they can meet Alex. Alex... Alex is the perfect embodiment of charm. Our disagreements and misunderstandings are exactly that, our disagreements and misunderstandings. As far as my parents are concerned, Alex is an extremely considerate, smiley, charming man and, most unexpectedly of all, my new husband.
When my mother – the person who spent the two happiest years of my life trying to awaken my conscience, exclaiming tearfully every time she saw me, ‘I can’t believe I gave birth to you and raised you into the person you’ve become!’ – when my mother finally sees him, she says, ‘Only now do I understand you, daughter...’
When my precious, beady-eyed sister, who had always helped and covered for me and more or less made my affair possible, but who had also never failed to remind me who the black stain on our family’s reputation was, stands open-mouthed for about five minutes, only slamming it shut to ask, ‘Where do they make those?!’, I realize that I am never going to be able to rest easy.
And even my father – a most unfriendly, unemotional man who is used to being shown respect rather than the other way around – had never, as far as I can remember, greeted and accepted Timothy the way he did Alex.
My official ‘wife’ status bleaches me of all sin and restores me into being a worthy member of the family. Yet I feel neither pride nor joy. There is a growing sense of unease in my heart, unease rather than fear because the latter is for more serious things like leukaemia, for instance.
The flight for the first leg of our journey – to Frankfurt – takes off at eight in the evening. Alex sits next to Danny, who wanted the window seat, and I sit with Sonia in the same row but across the aisle. I will always remember that March evening, with its fading orange light and Alex silhouetted against it, working, as always, on his tablet and laptop, as a turning point. I look at my beautiful husband and think about the huge mistake I’m making.