Once again
it was raining. The stormy wind was mercilessly crashing into the century-old
stemps of the abeles. A fearsome colide, a crash thundered into the nocturnal
silence – one huge, strong, digne tree had hugged lovingly his neighbour, a
tiny wooden house whose nylon windows were gracefully painted by the dextrous
breath of the storm.
Almost
instantly, a terrified scream followed, as if no one was sleeping in that
miserable home. From within its icy entrails, through its broken mouth, a child
emerged. Pale and skinny, it was crying and desperately calling its mother.
No one answered but the storm. She, a fierce
beast, caught its tiny body and squeezed it maternally within her lethal arms
as if she was wispering to it “Don’t wory, my baby, I’m your mother now, I’ll
take care of you, I promise, you won’t suffer anymore…”.
“No, let me
go!”, the kid was screaming, but the loving step-mother wouldn’t listen. She
kept on squeezing it, shouting to it, terrifying in her fury. She would never
be a mother, she would never be able to embrasse her own beloved child. She was
to be forever alone.
Realisnig
her failure as a female creature, she started to cry, too. But her tears
pierced like daggers the skin of the kid. Blood ran out and crimsoned the chin
of the house. The kid got bluer and bluer, it couldn’t fight its inquisitor
anymore. It gave up with one last silent cry that was hummed as if from its
heart rather than its mouth.
- -
Martin!
Martin! – a girl cried out from within the monstrous rouins of the house.
She was
pressed beneath the fallen roof of the house; in her pointless attempt to
reconciliate her restless mind with the devouring coldness of the winter, she
had fallen in an uneasy sleep thus she had been caught prisioner of the
monsterous house.
She was
fighting her way out, unconscious about the lurking torment out there. She
stepped on something tender – the moment she looked down, a horrified scream
deafened the storm’s shouters outside.
- -
Mother,
mother – she kept on screaming in delirium. – Mother, please, mother!
But the
women could not hear her any more. Skinny, old-looking and illfull, she had
died above the cadaver of her husband ; husband who’s heart could not bear the
coldness and the misery and had ceased to beat in the midle of the storm.
The girl
thrusted her head into the eye of the blind, glassless house in a desperate
attempt to localise her little brother. Alas, his corpse had been taken away by
his false, caring mother, who was now caressing its dead curls with her icy
hands.
Nothing she
could do – the girl got back into the monster’s stomac. She was bound to
survive. In a desperate attempt to preserve her body heat, she took off the
light dress of her mother’s corpse and the shirt of her father and decisively
stepped out of the door.
The torment
was now occupied with her new baby and wouldn’t pay attention to her. She seized
her chance and ran; as fast as she could. Away, away, away out of this
nightmare. Tired she was, but she could not stop, for the memoria of the
monster was hounting her. She couldn’t let it get her, she couldn’t fight it
all alone.
Came the
dawn – the sun reappeared from beneath the clouds and omniously illuminated the
fragile body of the exhausted child. It took no mercy on her, it didn’t even
try to heal with its golden rays her wounds. No, it just looked at her for a
second, then, too busy with his work, went on shining up there on the sky,
indiferent to the human’s pain.
Three days
later the girl was found by a farmer. He took her to the state’s hospital where
the doctors fed her and bandaged her woulnds. Then she was sent to an orphanage
where she melted her desteny with the ones of hundreds of abandoned children.
Taciturn
and solitaire, she was growing up within the cruelty and the indiference of her
step-mother – the state. No one wanted to adopt her for she was too old, whole
eleven years-old! Often, she would think of her former family. She wouldn’t
cry. In facts she was happy about them – they had been lucky that night – they
were not suffering anymore, they were happily resting in their eternal dreams
and could not feel the cruelty of the world.
She, she
was the unlucky one. She was to continue existing, alone, abandoned,
illiterate, miserable… She was to get elder, to be devoured by the worlds rules
– she might get married to some drunkman in order not to be alone, she might
work for him though he’d beat her every single night, she might work at the
market-place (if she’d be lucky enough to gain a freezing place out there) or
at the ring-road, where she’d be bound to offer herself to the foreign
truckers.
Now the
grief took control of her heart.
