Casualties of Forgiveness. Part X

Margaret Duzniak was sixteen when her family left Warsaw for a coastal mining town in Germany. Her brother Peter was slightly younger, soon a soldier but still a boy. Her father was a miner, her mother a drunk. The family learned the harsh lessons of immigrant survival. But the Moroccan man who came into their lives three years later was an intruder, not a fellow immigrant. A black smear across the family name.

“They’ll be happy you’re handsome and have a job,” Margaret offered as they walked through the door.

It was Adil’s first day in her family’s apartment. Her parents were gone until dinner. Peter in the bath. Adil placed vegetables on the table. She kissed him hurriedly as he began to chop.

“We’ve no cooking oil! I’ll run quick, you chop,” she said.

He felt suddenly foreign without her. He abandoned the zucchini to explore the rooms around him. Polish crucifixes hung differently on the wall. Porcelain statues revealed a greater obsession with the veils of the virgin mother.

Knock, knock, knock.

Adil was startled by a rhythmic banging from the bathroom. Inside the sound of a tap still running. A light was shining through the grate in the door, marking patterns on the wall. Knock knock knock continued.

“Everything alright?” he asked in a German that felt harsher without her. “I’m a friend of your sister’s.”

Silence, as the light switched off. A minute later the rhythms started again. Adil stepped inside hesitantly, saw a boy naked on the toilet. Peter Duzniak cowered. Adil remembered the kitchen knife still in his hand, retreated and closed the door behind him.

“Everything ok?” Adil repeated through the door.

Immediately the knock returned, the light moving shyly through thin wooden planks. Adil stepped inside again, the boy covering himself, shaking slightly. Peter touched the empty roll beside him, nodded toward the open doorway. Flash of light appeared on the wall and guided slowly to the left. Adil followed and found toilet-paper rolls on a shelf in the closet. He returned and tossed one from the doorway, shut the door behind him. Margaret returned and Adil mentioned nothing of the virgin statues.

The teenage boy confronted them in the kitchen, took the grocery bag from her hands and began scouring for something to eat. His pocket flashlight dangled from a chord around his child’s wrist. When they were formally introduced he shone it brightly into Adil’s eyes.

“Peter is mute,” Margaret explained. “He uses this light to communicate.”
“Is he trying to blind me?” he asked.
“He’s warning you to treat me well,” she laughed.
“Doesn’t he know sign language, or something less bright?” Adil ducked.
“Oh come on, it’s not that bad,” she said. “He’s practicing morse code. My little sailor.”

Margaret was still young. She was ignorant of the depths of violence her love could stir. She didn’t yet believe in hate or politcs. To her there was little difference between a German man and a Moroccan man in Germany. She decided there were more important things that distinguish one man from another. Adil had already crossed half of Europe and Africa on mining contracts. He told wonderous stories of exotic places. He held her firmly in his tales, but never in a way she couldn’t escape.

“A German I could live with, but not some dirty Arab!” her mother screamed in Polish in front of him. “Imagine, my daughter with brown Muslim children! Are we a joke to you?!”
“He’s Christian just like us,” Maria shouted back. “And even if he wasn’t what’s it to you!?”
“He’ll sell you in the desert,” her father half-joked.

They fell in love quickly, irresponsibly.

Her mother yelled often in the days after their engagement. In a week she was out of words and found solace in alcohol. Her father’s pain was composed of softer tones. He slipped a different man’s name into every conversation. Jakob. Florian. Markus. Jonas. Months later he’d continue, new names, names of men from Peter’s ship.

By the time Adil reached the Baltic coastline his back was bruised and his feet eager to settle. But he was still young and arrogant, without the knowledge not to pursue her. He’d grown up moving like wind through the desert, too quick and too often to settle on wisdom or hate. Adil saw only the woman before him and ignored the circles that held her.

It was only after their marriage that Adil felt the full burden of a community’s condemnation. Secretly he wondered whether the blood of childbirth might act as catharsis. Ancient ritual of sacrifice and renewal. But to those around her Maria Duzniak-Alzebar was a child of the desert, barren and without culture, without the blood of ancestors coursing through her vains.

The punishment that awaited him was the carrying out of a sentence. Self-fulfilling prophecy of a culture that still believed in bad omens. Adil returned late from the mines. Thick boots heavy upon his feet. The sons of men with lost jobs were drunk and belligerent. He walked past them and up the grey steps toward his apartment.

“What are you doing here?” Adil demanded.

Peter moaned like a wounded whale washed onto the beach. The young man had returned after eleven months under water. He learned quickly that a submarine was no place for explorers. The men on board shared small quarters and moved like caged wolves. In packs they singled out difference and beat it back into the night. Prejudice and pain are forms of knowledge unlearned in vast spaces. Thick tar stretches out until it thins away in the air. But these men were too busy carving out small territories. They hadn’t the opportunity to reflect on the ocean. No one learned how to pray for the promise of sighted land. Reasons for resentment accumulated and festered in the metallic caverns. Peter stepped onto the shoreline not a sailor, but a soldier returned from sea.

A shovel swung suddenly into Adil’s face in the darkened corridor. The sound of crooked thunder bounced off the walls.

Adil woke to cuts, bruises, a starving tiger’s teeth, its nails jagged nails digging deep, nails clawing, hysterically into his charcoal flesh. They struggled but Adil managed to flip the boy onto his back. He then used all his strength to hush the demonic moans crashing below him. The rhythm calmed as Adil added pressure. The boy was scratching, flailing, finally limp. Adil held silence in his hands, clenching tighter and for the longest moments of his life until only silence remained.

That night Adil left the dead and boarded a train heading west. Toward Spain and Morocco. Los Angeles, the furthest place he could find. He left to untangle and forget. He took only a sleeping child. A reason to start over.