by I V Olokita
“Ten!” I defied him, as if I made the rules, remarking, “Even I would have allowed a man ten minutes in the toilet for the last time of his life!”
Looking at me speechlessly, the guard nodded his approval, like a naughty child obeying his father. Closing the latrine door behind me, I quickly pulled out the paper and sat down to read. My photo was on the front page, next to a headline announcing that today I die. Browsing on, I was surprised to see a photo of my son next to a young woman with a baby in her arms. Drawing the paper close, I nearly succumbed to hallucinations: could she be…Matilda? No! Or couldn’t she? The striking resemblance between her and Matilda also reminded me I had a daughter, too. Trying to read on, I realized my English was too poor. Then the guard knocked on the door to remind me my time was up, so I folded the paper, sneaking it back to his desk, and went back to my cell. My momentary happiness turned at once into sadness and shame for my total ignorance of my children’s and grandchildren’s lives.
…nonetheless, I forgive you.” Thus, ended the brief note Deus left me the day he had departed from my life. Even though I had memorized every single word of it, during the days following Klara’s death, I never managed to read it through. Now, while I was reading that letter from where I had stopped years ago, I suddenly felt dizzy, sensing I was walking in circles, unconscious. Grabbing the wrinkled pages once again, I lay down on my hard and cold bed and was stricken with sorrow for reading so far only that part of the letter dealing with my son’s accusation of me, failing to see its most important part. My anguish grew stronger once I realized that by being mad at Deus, I assumed he had damned me for his stepmother’s death. I finally saw that at those moments I hated my own son, just as I had hated many others before. If so, I thought, with my eyes nearly overflowing with tears, I must dedicate the rest of my life to do my best to make him forgive me for how I used to treat him, and live entirely for him if I only could! Hiding the letter under my mattress, I reflected on everything he had written repeatedly, until my heart was overjoyed, letting me close my eyes and have a few minutes’ sleep.
“Human memories are those fragments of sights and sounds manipulated by our mind, hallucinations which sweeten bad dreams, and nothing else!” he wrote, which seemed terribly funny: after all, if this world was really controlled by some supreme power, He wouldn’t have empowered humans with this capacity. It is because every memory of ours has its own unique essence and stems from some reality. So, once one starts distorting one’s memories, they eventually get out of touch with reality. If that Supreme Being wanted us to remember everything as it really happened, it would have denied us the capacity to manipulate them. Since humans were endowed with the capacity to manipulate their past just as they please, I also gave myself the liberty to play with my own. I used to remember her during my cold German nights or warm Brazilian ones. I found it so strange since I have forgotten her facial features long ago, so I tried to reconstruct them, fitting her with a nose or a mouth to match her beauty as I still remembered it. I only remembered her hair blowing in the wind, whenever she went out of the house to call us for dinner or to bed. One feature was especially impressed upon me: her fair hair turning red after that drunken idiot knocked her out with one hammer strike. “Father!” I thought, “if you only showed her one last mercy, or just settle for a slap in the face, as you used to do dozens of times before, how could it have changed my life?! Or, maybe they mislead me once again, those memories... was my life’s journey not in vain? How happy is a man who plays God, as I’m still regarded by most of the mob surrounding me now? Isn’t it all due to what my father did to my mother so many years ago?!”
“Well, Herr Holland, these are the very last moments of your life!” the Judge informed me when I woke up from my contemplations. He lowered his head with sorrow for having to inform me my death was near.
“I would have never looked down when sentencing anybody to death,” I declared loudly, as I always did as if attempting to insult him for his demonstrated faintheartedness once I noticed it.
“Well, thank God I’m unlike you!” he retaliated with the wit expected of a man of his position and capacities, “Humans still have the ounce of compassion monsters like you lost long ago!”
“If Your Honor has that ounce of compassion,” I buckled down in an attempt to reverse my fate, as all death-row inmates do once they sense their judge might be compassionate enough to spare them. “Perhaps Your Honor will just let me rot away in prison for the rest of my life?” I begged on, like a fish on the shore struggling to return to the sea. The Judge, struggling with his emotions, first gave me a long gaze while mulling his long beard with his hand, and then pulled his long hair to its full length, displaying his long chin and two deep dimples that reduced his mouth to a tiny spot. Finally, just before his face nearly blew up, he stood up and hit the gavel, crying: “The convict sentenced to death, Herr Klaus Holland, will have the right to read the summary of his life story for one minute only. Then, if he convinces the court of his full repentance for all he did, I may reconsider his sentence!” The moment the Judge finished his sentence, and walked out of the courthouse, a torrent of loud abuses ran through the air. “Bring the convict to my chambers, to keep him out of harm’s way!” the judge told the orderlies, just before disappearing behind the heavy door separating him from the tumultuous mob, and they obeyed.
“Let me tell you that if I had an ounce of your straightforwardness which drove you all your life, I would have had you executed this very moment, in the middle of my courtroom, just as you did to your victims. Oh yes, Herr Holland, I would have made you read out a summary of your life, giving you no time to revise it, and then have you shot dead with one bullet in the back of your neck. All these I would have done in five minutes before going on my lunch break and discussing my next case. By God, this is how I would have disposed of you, Herr Holland. But ironically enough, in the United States of America, such a practice is inappropriate,” he concluded, fully stretching his tiny figure until he seemed to touch the ceiling with his head. “I suppose that while anywhere else in the world the right thing to do would be to put you out of all this worldly misery by smearing with your blood my whitewashed chamber’s wall, it’s not the case here and now. This, sir, is the Land of the Free, who try to find deep inside them an ounce of compassion even for the greatest scum of the earth and the embodiment of Satan, namely you, Herr Holland. Due to all that, after giving it much thought I decided, heavy-hearted, to allow you to unsettle my reassured conscience a little. But don’t get me wrong, Herr Holland: it doesn’t mean I’ll go easy on you!” he went on, closing in on me, “What you should read out in your summarized life story must express a wholehearted repentance! Oh, yeah, you should strike a chord in the heart of every single listener, even the toughest men of the firing squad you will face, making their entrails burn until they are overflowed with tears. Only if all this happens, and only for the safety of the great crowd who will gather to watch your execution, I will condemn you to spend the rest of your life in prison, contrary to your original sentence.”
I looked him straight in the face, blinking for a moment to avoid the sun blazing in my eyes. There was a lot on my mind that moment, for example, that he deprived me of the divine status which was exclusively mine until recently. Yet this time I was smart enough to hold my tongue, letting the Judge walk away to his desk. Then, two wardens held my arms to walk me back to my cell until my time comes.
For my last day, I asked permission to wear my best suit. It was dark violet, made of 100-percent Egyptian cotton, with a three-piece upper part with golden buttons all the way to the pants, delicately sown fine golden stripes and matching cufflinks, which stood out of the violet fabric, resembling yachts sailing towards the sunset. “I want to look majestically elegant in it,” I dared to tell the guard when I visualized it.
“You should also wear shining black moccasins with a golden stripe on their heels,” he tipped me, with a
big smile, as if reading my thoughts.
“I will,” I confirmed with a smile, as a perfect gentleman should. Then he turned away, showing me a box with a ribbon concealed until then behind his legs.
“I knew exactly what you would want for that special day!” my guard declared, opening my cell door and handing the present to me.
“You must be kidding me!” I cried scornfully just before he disappeared behind the locked door. “Oh, yeah!” he responded, his laughter rolling on and on.
Unfolding the striped suit, I shook the dust off it. “Where are the shoes?” I enquired, accepting my defeat.
“Buddy, you need no shoes where you’re going now, just a lot of luck and a high SPF tan lotion!” he responded, vanishing out of my sight.
I sat down on my narrow bed, covering my face with my hands. Indeed, until now I resisted all their maltreatment of me, defying all their nasty efforts to force some sentimentality out of me. But with my end so near, tears broke through from under my eyelids, flowing without me trying to hold them.
“Did we come at an inconvenient time?” I heard a pleasant womanly voice from across the bars.
Startled, I sprang up, wiping my eyes hastily.
“Have you just cried?” she asked calmly as if talking to herself, while I was looking at her and the man standing by her.
“I have,” I admitted my defeat quietly, casting my eyes down.
“Well, sometimes crying is good for you,” the lovely lady explained in an attempt to comfort a perfect stranger. “Deus, too, cries at night sometimes.”
“Heidi!” Deus exploded with a cry, seemingly embarrassed by her confession in front of a stranger.
“I guess you don’t know who I am,” Heidi went on, completely disregarding the words of the man next to her.
“Oh, miss!” I sighed, “I know you even better than yourself!” I responded defiantly, blowing my nose like a child insulted by some foolish mockery of other kids.
“So, who am I?” she put me to the test.
“You’re Heidi, the daughter of Matilda the Jewess! I do know everything about you!” I lied. “Heidi, my Jewish daughter!” I remarked, more affectionately than intended. That moment it struck me that I might have spoken too impulsively, with grave consequences on her future. If she really was my daughter, and knew nothing of it until then, the grandchild this couple had produced for me might seriously surprise them.
“Spit it out!” Deus encouraged her, patting her back while she vomited like hell into the small basin in my cell.
“My daughter?! My daughter?!” she repeated my words, looking up and yelling at Deus. “What does it mean!? Am I really his daughter or is it just a Christian bullshit of priests who call all fellow-humans ‘my children’?” She tried to explain it away, despite realizing this self-deception cannot last.
“No, Heidi. My father’s only God was always himself,” Deus confessed instinctively.
They were on the brink of insanity.
“Do you see what it means?!” Heidi yelled on, with goose pimples all over her body. “That…we are actually siblings!” she spat out with disgust at her own words, with all her body succumbing to convulsions. “So, our David will be a retard for the rest of his life, being the victim of an incestuous marriage!”
The news about the ill-fated baby she delivered in Brazil failed to reach my prison cell. I only learned about my unfortunate grandson the day before, from the newspaper, and it kept haunting me since then. Though this baby should have better been euthanized, yet now he lived, and had an ounce of me in him, so my greatest desire was to hear them praise him to me, right away.
“Deus!” I called my son loudly. “Heidi!” I cried on for her, as well, but to no avail. “It’s no use,” I realized. “Could have they come all the way here having no idea about them sharing the same blood!?”
“You scum!” Heidi screamed at me insanely, rushing at my cell with a fury-reddened face. “Ye stupid beast! Look what you’ve done to your own family!” she shook the bars madly as if attempting to pull them out. The moment her red hair scattering all over her face, I recalled her mother. Deus rushed to her yet failed to calm her down. Clinging to the bars, she just kept screaming on. My eyes followed her waving hair, wandering from side to side like poisoned rats. “I wish you dead!” Heidi yelled repeatedly until I had enough of it.
“Rest assured, my child,” I finally informed her to calm her down. Though I spoke in earnest, my face defied my mind, letting a little smile mark my face.
“Can’t you stop being the evil man you are!? Can’t you, just for a moment, try to play human!?” Deus demanded to know, frowning at me while restoring his wife’s hair to the back of her neck.
“Don’t you touch me, you bastard!” Heidi scolded him, hitting his hand. “It’s your fault as much as his! After all, it’s you who have always been his son, while I, just now…”
“Do you love him?” I wondered a few minutes later, once they both calmed down a little, yet she only responded with a silent look at me. “What about you, Deus? Do you love your sister?”
“Yak!” she expressed her disgust, her face twisting as if after tasting a sour lemon. “Don’t you dare mention this word!”
“Please, come in, and spend some quiet time with me,” I begged them, assuming that if they just asked, the guard would let them in my cell to allow me to offer my proper apology.
“Once I’m in, I’ll kill you with my bare hands!” Deus made a threat, revealing his teeth, yet his eyes still looked down, as if, just like before, he was afraid to face his father.
“If I’m to get killed, I’d rather it will be at your hands,” I retaliated right away, but he failed to hear me, and they both left hastily, leaving me all alone.
“Good morning!” the guard greeted me while bringing me my last breakfast.
“Good morning!” I greeted him back with a smile, despite realizing that the last morning of a man’s life cannot be any good.
“You’ve got a visitor!” the guard informed me, leaving my cell before letting me respond.
“A visitor?” I wandered.
“Yes. Your son came to say goodbye before I’ll take you to face the firing squad”
“I never hoped to see you here, after yesterday!” I told Deus while he leaned against the outside of my cell bars. “Where’s Heidi?” I enquired but was met with silence.
“I want you to die today!” he finally hissed through his teeth.
“I beg your pardon?” I asked as if I didn’t hear him clearly.
“I decided I want you dead today!” he repeated, this time loudly.
I gave him a silent look, feeling my love for him growing terribly strong.
“You no longer deserve my love!” Deus finally exclaimed as if reading my mind when he could stand the silence no longer, turning away and vanishing from my sight.
“Let’s go,” the guard, who watched the whole scene nearby, told me. When he opened the cell door, I instinctively stretched my hands for him to cuff me. “We need these no longer, buddy,” he whispered with a somewhat compassionate tone. “From where you go now, nobody escapes!”
Walking around me, he stopped behind my back, and then pushed me in the back all along the corridor. Only when we reached the center of a vast dirt yard, with tens of thousands of people crowding there to watch my end, the guard stepped away.
“I recall the meadows of my home valley, and the old city walls seen through the windows of the narrow kitchen, back in the house of the man who smashed my mother’s skull with a hammer,” I started addressing the masses around me, my eyes searching for my son in the crowd. “The smell of the Camp at the foot of Udenspul hills, where thousands of people lived and died, is still alive in my nostrils, just as I have the memory of the snowcaps on the mountaintops in the warm summer days, and the eyes of Jesus the Redeemer overlooking the
lights of Rio by night, which seem to flow with tears! On top of all that, many life stories resurface to my mind, mine own and those of many others. So here I am, Klaus Holland, playing out the final chapter of my story. Though I spent most of my life under other names, this is the only name with which I am doomed to live, like a damnation. In that great void between all the names I assumed, and all the memories you and I share, multiple worlds have been lurking. I was treading the earth, passing by you like a phantom, living my full life cycle, bringing you misery but also the joyful cries of newborns. I assumed dominion over and then took refuge among you. All the while, under all the names I happened to use, myriads of humans came my way, whom I loved in many ways, from those drowning in the camp sewers to the women in my life and the children I gave them. In addition to them, I also loved myself. On certain occasions I believed they all, just like you, are God’s creatures, mistaking even myself for one. With every soul I granted as much as another minute of life, and every soul I denied this, I believed that God is always with us. After all, how can a human pray for His forgiveness if one fails to tell right from wrong, and sin from grace? For such a person, the only choice is just to cease to exist!”
“What about you, Herr Holland?!” the judge interrupted my speech, remembering that it was shortly before the lunch break. “Could you ask your God’s forgiveness for all the evils you inflicted on humankind!?”
“You fool!” I responded calmly, smiling for the very last time, and then, raising my head, to face the penetrating gaze of my son, I said, in a language only he understood: “Isn’t it exactly what I just did?”
About the author
I.V. Olokita has been facing life-threatening situations for most of his life, specializing in the management of medical aid to disaster areas all over the world. He has a BA degree in logistics, and an MA degree in emergency and disaster situations’ management. He also volunteers for rescue missions in disaster areas all over the world.