It was midday on August 8 and my father stood in the hospital’s parking lot. My mother called out to him and he searched the windows of the hospital with his gaze trying to find her. She was on the third floor and the window was wide open. My father saw me for the first time then. I was just a bundle in my mother’s arms.

It was 1971 and my father walked into a restaurant where my mother worked as a cook. Their eyes met and they smiled at each other for the first time. She served him a warm cup of coffee and they struck up a conversation. It was an innocent interaction that within it held a future consisting of a marriage, a son, alcoholism, arguments, heartbreaks and a divorce. Their destinies were decided over friendly smiles and coffee.

None of us knows the future and because of that, they were blameless in that moment. That moment is so significant and so fateful but to them it carries no such weight as it was happening. It was effortless and it flowed. The moment felt pleasant as they were starting to consider each other. They were brave and fearless in that moment because it’s much easier to ignore a smile than to give one back; it’s easier to stick your head into a newspaper than it is to indulge a stranger in a conversation.

If one always considered the possible and unpredictable consequences in every moment then one would never act, one would never get to live. We only have one shot at life; we are all rookies and amateurs so we can’t be blamed for small infractions.

I often cursed the day I was born when life got too unbearable wishing I never came into existence, wishing that my parents never met. I also had a sister that was born before me but she died in the incubator being too underweight for a newborn. The date of her birth and her death was the same, a life lasting less than 24 hours.  My mother told me that I wouldn’t have been born if the sister had lived. If she had lived, I would’ve never known suffering, illness, war, poverty, injustice... But I would’ve never known joy, would’ve never experienced comradeship with others, never felt what it is like to be in love, never saw a sunrise or a sunset, I would’ve never experienced comedy and laughter.

It’s strange that her death brought into the world another life. Out of death sprang a life. A female sacrificed so that a male can emerge in her place, a continuous ebb and flow of life. Nevertheless, I am here, she is not, and I must carry this gift since no one else can carry it for me.

So many things needed to align for me to come into existence such as mother and father meeting each other, my infant sister dying, a specific spermatozoid beating out 40000 other spermatozoids. If my mother spilt the coffee by accident and burned my father’s hand that might’ve ruined the moment and their lives would’ve went in different directions and I wouldn’t be here pondering and reflecting.  My non-existence could’ve been sealed by little things playing out differently but in the end they didn’t and that allowed me to be. The odds were beaten, the lottery of life was won but with no deed of my own. Life is an award and nobody is aware of their nomination for it.

*

Suddenly I see my father yelling at my grandmother:

“That’s enough! I don’t ever want to hear about him again. I don’t have a father and I never did. I don’t even have one memory of him, not even a feeling. He’s nothing to me.”

I try to stay with that memory but I lose it as another one starts.

*

I was four or five years old and my father dropped me off at the kindergarten. I walked into the classroom and I was informed that my drawing from yesterday had won me a prize. The teacher makes me stand high up on a chair and she gives me a small toy as an award. I looked around at the other kids with a grin and at that moment I noticed my father walking by outside through the windows. My father was wearing his navy blue coat and carrying his black leather suitcase. His dark hair was slightly peppered with grays. He smiled as he waved bye to me. I waved back enthusiastically as my smile widened. I was truly happy.

In that moment a whole universe of contentment was contained. That moment was a completely different world. In my mind, it was a romanticized, almost utopian world. My parents were together, the country was together, and I won a little toy for a silly drawing. How much more can a child ask for. In that moment I was unaware how fast our little personal worlds can change and how fast time goes by, relentlessly bringing novelty with it. In that moment, there was so much promise, but promise of nothing necessarily definable or detailed. It’s a promise of a feeling if anything, a feeling of fulfilment. It is that feeling of fulfilment that seems to become more elusive as we grow up.

*

My father was seven when he walked into a classroom for the first time. During the roll call, my father impatiently waited as his name was towards the end of the list. All the kids erupted in a group giggle when the teacher pronounced my father’s last name. It’s an odd, foreign sounding last name. My father, in embarrassment, tucked his chin in and looked down at the desk.

Later, on the way out of the school he noticed a group of teachers standing together and talking. He started to feel uneasy as he noticed that they were all throwing glances at him, and whispering to each other. One teacher was continuously staring at him while another pointed his finger at him before one of his colleagues, who told him not to point, lowered his hand.

Upon exiting the school, my father was near tears and he didn’t even know the reason why. His mother, Maria, was waiting for him outside and he ran towards her hoping that she would protect him from all these new and strange behaving people. Maria noticed that her son’s eyes were swelling up.

“What happened sweetie” she inquired.

“I don’t like school,” he said while choking on the first wave of tears.

*

            It was spring 1968 and students across the world were rising against governments in the east and west hemispheres. General strikes, protests and demonstrations were springing up from U.S. to France to Japan. The students were asking for more freedom and equality and protesting against authority and control. My father was 20 years old. He was a university student studying economics in the capital city.

In the same city seventeen years later, he was standing under a window of the hospital looking up at my mother as she was displayed me to him. In that moment he is far from that student that he was seventeen years earlier, the cracks had begun to show. The echo was reaching him and was shattering his psyche. He breathed in deep with a smile on his face as the warm breeze caressed the city. Seeing me for the first time was the last time he truly felt happy even though his self-destruction had already begun.

            It was a May, 1968. My father walked out of the university building and headed home. He moved leisurely as he enjoyed his walk. He heard noise and shouts in the distance. Soon he saw a large crowd of students. They were protesting against the Communist absolutism. The students wanted more room to breathe. Father stopped in his tracks and looked down the street where the students had congregated. The students were blocking the usual path he took to the bus stop.

 It was the first day of the demonstrations since they were only happening in other countries up to that point. What my father saw on TV had suddenly been transported into the city streets which he knew so well. The same city streets which he used to make his getaways as he skipped classes, the same cobble stone streets he used to find his way to taverns where he would have drinks with the local old timers and bohemians. Father always sought out the company of older and wiser men, men who unlike his fellow students had life experiences and had seen it all or so they claimed. He would indulge in their stories and in the drink.

            Father stopped and thought if he should head towards the crowd or avoid them by turning left into an alleyway. He stood at a crossroad without realizing it. To him it was just another day. Father was already bitter. He was young but he was already pessimistic. The echo had started and he felt it fleetingly out of the corner of his mind.

He did not share the idealism of the students and was worried about the possible confrontations with police. He saluted the effort students were putting in but he was not willing to participate himself. He turned down the alley way and instead of finding his way to the bus stop he found his way to a local bar. In there a bitter old man told him that the students are being unrealistic and father felt reassured about his choice as he swung one back.

            As father drank, the photo of the Communist Dictator, Marshal Joseph, hung on the wall. The dictator was smirking at my father and all the other alcohol enthusiasts.

            After a week of unrests, Marshal Joseph made a symbolic gesture by showing up to the demonstrations in his white military uniform on a white horse with heavy security to calm down the students. The student demonstrations eventually ended after some small concessions were promised and father felt even more vindicated in his decision but there was also a feeling of emptiness within him, emptiness that he tried to fill with booze.

Even though it was a losing struggle it was a fight worth participating in, a fight worth believing in. It was a good fight and even though father loved to watch boxing, he was not willing to participate in political and social battles. Father greatly mistrusted taking sides in politics although the world sometimes does not care and will choose a side for you even if you claim to be neutral. Being indifferent towards a ruling regime does not inherently imply that you support it but it sure does imply that you are not against it. Father did not support totalitarian communism but he did not rebel against it either, which implies that he didn’t think it was bad enough to require a rebellion.

            In the end, Marshal Joseph never implemented the changes he promised to the students and my Father was not surprised. Would things have played out differently if he had gone to the demonstrations, if he got all his friends and colleagues involved and passionate about it? Did the protests really need a dozen more people to reach the tipping point, to be successful, to actually matter? Was my father the drop that was needed to spill over the cup and change the course of history? I know that the geezers that he drank with would have said no.

*

            There was an unusual rise in UFO sightings all across the country in the year before the outbreak of the civil war. Many people noticed unusual metallic objects hovering in the skies above the capital city. There were plenty of sightings in my own hometown too. The objects were mostly seen in the late afternoon hours, in the hours when people were going back home from work. My Father was one of the people who saw a UFO during that time.

            He was driving back from work and he was waiting for the red light to change when he noticed the object in the sky through the side window of the car. He rolled down the window to get a clearer look at the UFO. The object was still there, hovering above a building in the distance. My father couldn’t believe his eyes so he started to look around to see if any other people were seeing the same thing he was seeing.

He turned his head left and right and looked at the people that were in cars at the same red light as him. He looked at the pedestrians who were walking and realized that nobody in his vicinity noticed the UFO except him. Just as he was about to yell out to a pedestrian and point out the UFO to him, the object moved to the right and went behind a taller building.

The light changed to green and Father decided to drive around and to get to an angle where he can see if the object was hovering behind the tall building. He drove distractedly as he kept looking up to see if the object might move and reveal itself again. Father drove around the building a few times but the UFO was nowhere to be seen.

Father arrived home a little later than usual due to his UFO hunting and my mother was not pleased. I was sitting on the carpet playing with my toys when father walked in.

            “Where were you,” my mother asked right away.

            “You’re not going to believe this,” my Father said with a smile. “I don’t know if I believe it really.”

            “What happened now,” my mother asked in an irritated tone of voice.

            “You know all the recent TV and newspapers reports about the UFOs that have been seen all around the country? I actually just saw one of them.”

            “So you went drinking again?”

            “I’m not drunk, it wasn’t a hallucination at all.”

            “ Did you start taking drugs? Are you on some sort of a drug?”

            “Do I look like I’m on a drug right now? I’m not under the influence of anything and I know what I saw. It wasn’t like a split second or anything. That thing was up in the sky for a good ten seconds.”

            “You’re talking nonsense. Who knows where you were and now you are trying to cover it up by making up ridiculous excuses. You hear about UFOs on the news and you think that it’s believable to use as a cover story.”

            “You are unbelievable. I’m half an hour later than usual and you make this much of a deal. I don’t smell of alcohol and I’m not acting weird at all. I’m trying to share with you what just happened to me and you keep going on with your paranoid theories!”

            “Don’t yell in front of the child.”

            “I just might’ve witnessed a spaceship with beings from another planet, another solar system and all you can think about is how to diminish what I’m trying to share with you. This is a life changing experience. I never thought that I would see something like that. It felt unreal, like I was watching a scene from a movie. It makes me wonder about a lot of things.”

            “You can wonder and talk about UFOs all you want when we get a divorce.”

            “Don’t talk about the divorce in front of the child.”

            My mother looked over at me. I was completely oblivious to their conversation as I was deep into my fantasy world where my toys were the main characters. My mother walked into the kitchen and Father followed her.

            “I mean doesn’t that make you think about things,” my Father continued. “Maybe aliens look at us how we look at animals in the wild or in the zoo. Maybe they even created us; maybe they are looking to see how their experiment is coming along. Maybe they want to help but are afraid that they might cause a mass panic among people. Anything is possible. Seeing a UFO doesn’t really answer any questions at all, it just confirms that they are there but no reason as to why or how. I now know they exist but nothing beyond that.”

            “You are talking crazy”

            “There are so many signs with all these sightings lately and what about that church down south? There are medieval frescos that clearly depict flying machines. You saw that documentary with me. How can one explain that? Whoever painted that clearly saw a UFO back then. That means that they have been around for a long time. I read some magazine where this researcher said that he believes that aliens have always been around and have assisted us in various ways during our evolution.”

            “I don’t know and since when are you so much into science fiction all of a sudden?”

“It’s not science fiction, I actually saw it. I am seriously talking about this. My mind is racing, I’m thinking about it so much now because I just saw it and I’m recalling all these previous details. I didn’t think much about it but now I feel that the previous few things I’ve seen or read have almost been pointing to what occurred today. It is almost as if they were signs pointing toward a future event. Maybe I’m just starting to imagine things now. Anyways, it’s very fascinating. What do you think about all this?”

            “I seriously think that we should proceed with the divorce as we have been discussing lately.”

*

            When my Father was thirteen years old, he had a best friend called Marco. They were hanging out one day when they decided to visit their favourite place. They walked along on the train tracks. They eventually reached a train graveyard where they always went to hop on and off the train cars and examine their dusty, spider-webbed interiors. Marco started to look around to make sure there was no one around. My Father noticed this and approached him.

            “What are you looking for,” my Father asked Marco.

            “Just looking around to see if there is anybody here” said Marco while still moving his head and looking around.

            “Why? You know nobody ever comes here, we never seen anybody here before.”

            “I want to tell you something but you have to promise not to talk anybody about it.”

            “You know I won’t, I can keep a secret. What is it?”

            “My dad told me some stuff...”

            “Like what?”

            “He said Marshal Joseph is a liar and a murderer.”

            Father momentarily froze up and Marco noticed it.

            “You have to promise not to tell anybody about what my father told me,” Marco asked with a hint of panic in his voice.

            “I promise I won’t tell anybody,” my Father said and reassured him by crossing his heart.

            “He said that General Alexander was the true war hero and that Marshal Joseph had him killed so he can be the supreme ruler of our country. My dad said that the General never collaborated with the Nazis and that he actually started fighting them before Marshal did. He also said that Marshal was focused more on fighting the Generals troops than he was on fighting the Nazis.”

            “How can that be true? Everything that they thought us in school about the Marshal would be lies then”

            “My dad said that all the heroic poems about Marshal that we had to memorize and recite are part of...he called it...washing our brains with lies. He said...He said it was propaganda. That’s when a lie is repeated over and over again until it becomes the truth and no one doubts it.”

            “So those stories we had to read about his heroic actions in World War 2 were all made up? I really liked those stories but now when I think about it, they do seem too good to be true.”

            “The pledge of allegiance that we had to recite in grade one, the red handkerchiefs we had to wear were not just to show support to communism but to accept the Marshal as a national hero and our saviour, the one that saved us from the Nazis.”

            “But your dad says that General Alexander also fought the Nazis...but they always made him out to be the evil guy in those heroic stories.”

            “Don’t you find that strange? He was more often the villain than the Nazis themselves.”

            “I guess because he was a traitor and its worse when our own betrays then when a foreigner attacks.”

            “But that’s the point. He wasn’t a traitor. He fought against the Nazis until the end. My dad said the he was killed because he fought against Marshals partisans not because he was a collaborator. They had to make up an accusation that was worse than the truth. They had to convince people that he wasn’t a hero at all and that Marshal was the only hero and the sole saviour of our people.”

            “I don’t understand how lying on such a mass scale can be possible. Are you sure your dad wasn’t joking with you, that he was drunk or something?”

            “No way, he wasn’t going to talk about it but he let something slip and I heard it and then he just opened up. He was pissed off about something and I guess he just felt like talking to me about this.”

            “He could be lying for some personal reason. You never know.”

            “He has no reason to lie to me, what does he gain by lying to his own son? He even told me that the only person that can gain from lying is Marshal himself because lies, fantasies, and made up stories are what’s keeping him in power.”

            “I just find it hard to believe...I mean...how come we never heard about this before? Where are all the other people that know the truth? Does anybody else know? How does your dad know by the way?

            “My dad’s uncle fought with the Generals troops. He emigrated at the end of the war. My dad said that many people know the true version of the events but they are scared of the government. People can be imprisoned and killed if they try to challenge the official version of history. That’s why you can’t tell anybody what my dad said. If whoever you tell goes and informs the authorities, then my dad will be arrested or killed or sent to a labour camp.”

            “A labour camp? What’s that?”

            “It’s a prison where they force the people to do heavy labour. They are forced to break stones all day, every day. It doesn't matter if it’s really hot or really cold outside. There is no use to breaking the stones apparently. They are just made to do it as a form of torture. The prisoners are also beaten up and whipped.”

            “A prison like that exists in our country?”

            “Yeah my dad said it’s located on an uninhabited island. They call it the Nude Island.”

            “Why is it called that?”

            “Because sometimes they would make the prisoners work naked to humiliate them.”

            My father stops and looks away into the distance as if trying to incorporate this picture of the world into the picture that had been constructed for him. He looks down at the ground and shakes his head in disbelief.

            “I don’t understand...I never thought...I never heard...”

            “My dad is secretly against communists...I know that know now after the long talk we had last night. I remember you told me that you mother fought with the partisan’s.”

            My father looked at Marco and nodded affirmatively.

            “Why don’t you ask her? She would know something about it.”

            “She barely talked to me about her war experiences; just bits and pieces, here and there. I think she tries not to think about that period since that was the last time she saw my father.”

            “Ask her about it. I guarantee that she will confirm some of the things my dad said.”

            “I thought you didn’t want me to talk to anybody about it. What if my mother decides to tell the authorities, she fought with the communists as you pointed out,” my father teased Marco with a grin on his face.

            “You’re right, don’t say anything then.”

            They sat there for a few minutes, each in their own thoughts. Marco remembered something that piqued his curiosity.

            “You told me once that your dad fought along with your mother,” Marco inquired.

            “That’s what my mother told me. They were shoulder to shoulder in fighting the Nazis.”

            “But why did he have to leave the country if he fought with the partisans?”

            Father realizes that he doesn’t have an answer to this question and Marco doesn’t pursue it, sensing the confusion in my father.

            “Maybe I should talk to my mother,” my father said.

*

            Father had a feverish dream the night before his thirteenth birthday. In his dream, he is walking down a street during a sunny day and suddenly it’s night time. He continues walking and notices that up ahead is a policeman standing and staring straight into his eyes. The brutish cop yells out asking my father what he is doing out at this time of night. My father tries to respond but the police officer suddenly smacks him across the mouth with his baton. Father grabs his mouth and starts to spit out bloody pieces of his teeth into his hand. He looks up at the police officer only to realize there are prison bars between them now. He’s in a prison cell. Father looks through the bars and sees a policeman who looks exactly like him. In shock, he spits more blood and teeth on the floor of the jail cell.

 Father wakes up disoriented thinking at first that he is awaking in a prison cell. Once he realizes that he is home, he still tries to remember if he was actually arrested the previous night. Then in a moment of panic, he quickly raises his hand to his mouth and touches at his teeth by pressing his fingers into his lips and cheeks. It was just a bad dream.

*

            Over time, father noticed that his mother often pulls out a small wooden box out of the old closet. She would get teary eyed shortly afterwards as she put the box back in its hiding place. One day, he was sixteen years old and he was alone at home. He decided to open the old closet, which he never did before. Father pulled the doors apart all the way, so the closet stood wide open in front of him. A smell of old clothes and settled dust greeted his face.

He looked around and realized that the closet was had clothing for an adult male and that clothes consist mostly of men’s suits. He searched for the box and eventually found it stashed on the top shelf behind a pile of trousers. The box itself had no markings on it and my father slowly took of the lid. He saw a stack of black and white photographs. He dug his hand into it to pulled all of the content out but through the tips of his fingers, he realized there was something else underneath the stack of photos. He pulled the photos out and saw that at the bottom there was a bunch of envelopes.

            He looked at the envelopes and noticed that they were sent from some place in Germany. His father wrote the letters. He placed the letters back into the box and focused on the pictures. They were old black and white photos mostly of his parents together or separate and with some other people that he didn’t recognize. They were pictures of a pre-war life in a small, quiet town. He started to skim through the pictures as his disinterest grew but one of the photos that he only glanced at tickled his psyche. He shuffled the deck of photos back to the one that piqued his curiosity.

            In the photo a man, which father knew is his own father Peter, was standing upright in the town square dressed in an army uniform along with other soldiers. There was some sort of campfire in the background of the picture. From history lessons father knew that the uniform that Peter was wearing is not one of the communist partisans. He looked at it closer and saw that there is a whiteout mark on the right armpit of the uniform. Father realized that it was put there on purpose. He moved his eyes slightly away from the armpit and found the clue he was looking for on the chest pocket of the uniform. A silver German eagle badge adorned the left breast pocket.

            Fathers breathing stopped and a sharp feeling cut through his chest like a dagger. His hand slightly shook and the photo fluttered down on to the red and black Turkish carpet. He tried to swallow a lump but almost choked. The back of his eyes tensed up, his knees gave out, and he grabbed on to one of the closet doors. That was why Peter abandoned him and his mother. It wasn’t because of some misunderstanding with the authorities. Peter joined the Nazi occupiers.