Episode 5: Catharsis I
"You are not my son!" shouted Demosthenes.
And these were his last words, as the ice cracked and he disappeared forever in the frozen waters of his own pond. It was early spring, and the ice was unsafe…
“Tata, Tata, wait, NYET!” , cried Claus, “please let me explain! It’s not what you think!”.
Poor Claus thought his father had just learnt that he was not his son, that Olga had cheated him and that he was the offspring of another man, and was only trying to console him. And in the Brazilian soap series he liked to watch in the afternoons, the eternally cheating couples always cried "It's not what you think!" when they were found out. But God had decided otherwise…
Before he could get near him, Demosthenes disappeared in a big hole under the ice and in the frozen water, with a gurgling sound that sounded a bit like the burps he made after eating his greasy boar steaks, the good old non-macrobiotic days.
And this is how the story was sealed for Demosthenes and Claus. Claus never knew that his father did not know that he was not his son. And Demosthenes did not know that his son knew that he was not his sun. Two parallel worlds that sunk, literally, in a frozen pond in Tzatzikistan on a frozen night (on an early spring, may I add, although I hate to repeat myself) .
Years later, when the pond dried up because of climate change, they never found the remains of Demosthenes in it. All they found at the permafrost bottom where Demosthenes would have lied was a fresh red rose and 2 kilos of expired feta. And people have witnessed that in the nights, when (early) spring approaches, they hear a wolf howling “Olgayaaaaaa, Olgushkaaaaaa, …” by the pond. Some mothers of Kosmosibirsk even today use Demosthenes to make their children eat their food. “Eat it!”, they say, “or Demosthenes will come out of the pond and eat it from you!”.
Claus never got over his father’s disappearance. He never skated again. He quit his modelling studies and never managed to take over his father’s business successfully (he was selling Omega 3 sausages the last years before he drowned). Soon, money became scarce and he had to reduce himself to his house, where he spent hours looking at the dried-up family pond, only he had no one to wait for. He started not feeling well, listening non-stop to his father’s old balalaika records and his father-turned-vampire crying “Olgaaaaa” every night around midnight from the dried up pond. Something had to give…
Then, one evening, he opened his closet, looked at the cheap IKEA mirror (IKEA had just opened up at Kosmosibirsk and the new 3.5€ Bekväm mirror had become very en vogue) and had a vision.
He looked at his reflection and the dress of Olga he was wearing, and said to himself:
My name is Carlos, and I am a person with problems!
He felt strength come back in all his muscles and saw a timid aura around his head . He opened the door and without looking back rushed to the local tourist agency of Kosmosibirsk. People were looking at him strangely and he kind of felt proud about it. A bit like God in person. “Don’t worry”, he’d have liked to tell them, “one day the blessing will get to you as well!”. In reality of course, they stared at him because in his hurry he had forgotten to take off his mother’s robe.
“Carlos”, he said to the young, rather awkward looking, bored lady in the tourist agency. “My name is Carlos and I need a one-way ticket on the next plane to Brussels” (he thought better to skip the “…and I am a person with problems” part). She looked at him and his clothes and, after a second’s hesitation, ironically asked: “Carlos or Carla?”.
He gave her a lethal look that could have meant “I forgive you, for you are an idiot AND ugly, and in the best case scenario you can change only one of the above”, but he preferred to keep a low profile. An oxymoron of course, because how low a profile can a man keep wearing his mother’s robe on the street.
And in a few hours he found himself in the nearest airport, with a ticket to Brussels with Schnellair at hand.
He was so enthusiastic that during the trip he thought he heard birds singing. This was his first time in an airplane and he did not realize that it was the blocked ventilator of the low-cost airline above his head that made this bird-singing noise. “But not the last one”, he thought, smiling to himself, overconfident that he would soon be able to travel around the globe in less than 80 days and wondering how it had not occurred to him earlier to go to Brussels and become a translator at the Council, the "rich and famous" kind he saw in the Brazilian soap series he adored to watch and which he thought were Mexican.
Compared to Kosmosibirsk, Zaventem looked from the airplane as it made its final approach more like Manhattan than Flat Land with cows and potatoes. “A midsummer night's dream!”, he thought to himself, despite the usual constant drizzle, trying to remember who it was that had said that, Waijda or Einstein.
Soon he was waiting in the “Other countries” queue, with a big smile on his face and about 56 people in front of him. Thinking that discrimination was all behind him, he had changed shortly before landing in the tiny airplane toilet into his mother’s robe again. And he was so sure that the hard times were over that, in a burst of unfortunate enthusiasm and optimism, he had thrown his old jeans in the airplane WC, clogging it for ever...
Click here for the song Claus was listening to on his iPod during his flight to Brussels