A Breath Of Fresh Air
Haskovo, Bulgaria, 2007
Boulevard Stefan Stambolov 27: the address of a large, crumbling building, a reminiscent of the Communist era. The building has twelve floors, sixty apartments. On the surface, it is just an ordinary building, but there is something else beneath. And it’s not pretty. Beneath the surface, it is filled with pain. It is filled with people who breathe the hopelessness and desperation in the air, and become infected with it themselves. Rarely does anyone break free from here. This is a prison of the mind; it holds you captive until you are strong enough to take a breath of fresh air.
It is here that Elena has spent the past twenty years of her young life with her parents. They own a two bedroom apartment, with old shabby furniture from the days of her grandma. Her father is an alcoholic who works at the local cigar factory. He’s rarely home. Her mother is unemployed. The recent economic crisis made her redundant. She used to work in a clothing factory.
Elena sells shoes in a new store downtown. She sells shoes, because her parents could not afford to put her through college. She sells shoes and goes home each night and breathes the hopelessness and desperation in the air and becomes infected by it. She sells shoes and refuses to see a better life.
Except when she opens her art book. It is only there where she breathes a breath of fresh air. She’s lost among the pages of her art- art depicting the depression, the hopelessness, the putrid air. And yet, art that somehow holds a ray of hope.
Here she is now, in her room. Her art book in front of her, her pencil in her hand. She’s in a world of her own. The lines grow on the page, and she can’t believe she’s the one making them appear there. They are large, rough and unforgiving. They scream at her, they become violent, they drink. They’re her father. She scowls. She can hear him in the living room, yelling at her mother:
‘I work all day, I expect a meal on the table. Where is my meal?’
‘You’re drunk.’ Her mother says feebly. ‘You know we ran out of money. All we have is a bit of bread left over from yesterday, but I was saving it for Elena-’
‘Twenty years ago, and we were living like kings! We had food on the table, places to go, work- we had it all! And now, what do we have now, huh? Nothing. We have nothing.’ He shakes his head bitterly.
‘Well, maybe if you hadn’t gambled all our savings at a poker game…’ Her mother begins feebly, the slightest hint of accusation in her voice.
‘Shut up, bitch.’ He yells, and covers his head with his hands, as if to protect himself from reality.
‘Elena’ He yells even louder, as if she couldn’t hear him already. ‘Elena, get over here, you ungrateful whore.’
She does as she’s told. She knows better than to argue.
‘Yes father?’ She asks, lowering her head.
‘I need money.’ That statement makes Elena shiver. It makes the hairs on her back stand in fear. It makes her heart heavy.
‘I have no money, father.’ Elena says, not daring to look up.
He grabs her and pushes her against a wall.
‘Why not? Do you not work, you lazy cunt?’
‘I gave you all I had yesterday.’ Elena says, and suddenly looks at him, hate in her eyes. Dare she speak one word against him, and in front of him at that? The anger, the humiliation, the hurt- it is suddenly too much.
‘And you spent it on a bottle of Vodka, you selfish, sick bastard!’ As soon as she utters the words, she regrets them. Not because they weren’t true, but because of what is about to follow.
He raises his hand as if to slap her, but her mother stands between them and grabs his hand. Elena’s eyes widen as she takes in the action before her. For the first time in their twenty years of marriage, her mother dares to fight back. And she sees her mother’s frail figure contrasted by his large, rough one, doing her best to protect the one thing she has in this world. And Elena’s heart breaks. It breaks because love does not conquer all, like movies and stories try and teach us. It breaks because the pure love of this woman for her child is not enough to protect her.
‘Gavril, Gavril leave her,’ she says, determination in her voice ‘She’s your flesh and blood, and she doesn’t deserve this…’
She trails off as she sees the fury in her husband’s eyes. A fury well known to her, one that inspires fear in her frail body. He grabs her. Elena yells. And in a fraction of a second her mother has landed on the glass table. The glass shatters. The little hope in this home shatters. There’s blood everywhere, as the pieces of broken glass cut into her head, her hands, her body. She chokes and spits out glass.
‘Mother!’ Elena cries. ‘Mother, hold on, mother! I love you!’ Desperation. Hopelessness. So much of it.
An ambulance is called. Her father is too stunned to realize what to do. The paramedics have taken her mother, and she follows them to the hospital. Her father is with her now. They do not speak. They wait anxiously.
The minutes seem like hours. The large clock on the wall is their only distraction. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. A little girl has scraped her knee, her mother washes the wound and binds it with some old cloth. A caress on the cheek, followed by a gentle kiss and the girl bolts out of the door again Tick. Tick. Tick. They’re at the beach now. It’s happier times -when they had money. Her mother builds a sand castle with her, her father lifts her up on his shoulders. High, high up. So she can see the world. So she can feel the freedom that comes with being so high up. Tick. Tick. Tick. Her daddy is drunk. She’s never seen him like this before. He’s a different person. He’s a different man. He just looks like her daddy. But her daddy would never hurt her mommy like that. He would never give mommy a black eye. Except he did. And he has been doing the same for the past twelve years. Tick. Tick. Tick. Minutes like hours.
The doctor comes out, a somber look on her face.
‘The skull was severely fractured,’ she says ‘from the impact. She lost too much blood. She was too frail to be able to handle this type of injury. We did everything we could. I’m terribly sorry. It’s hard to believe she fell though…’
Elena looks at the doctor, and she looks at her father. She’s sick of lying. Why should she? Why should she lie to help the murderer of her mother? She gets up and says, with a voice devout of any emotion:
‘She didn’t fall. He killed her. He couldn’t wait until she died. He killed her slowly each day, every single day he drank her life away. And today, he decided he couldn’t wait until she died. So he killed her.’
She runs out the hospital door before her father can say anything. She runs and doesn’t stop. She wishes she could run fast enough to escape reality. Tears stream down her cheeks, as the pain grasps her heart. She’s suffocating. The pain is so strong, it’s suffocating her. She stops in the middle of the streets and cries. She cries out loud, a cry of agony, pain and restraint that is finally giving way to freedom.
The funeral is the next day. She pays for it with money she had been hiding from her parents. Money she’d been saving up for tickets for her and her mother. Tickets to Paris, that would take them away from him to a beautiful place. To freedom. Not many people show up. Some neighbors and former colleagues from the clothing factory. Her father isn’t there. As if he’d dare to show his face. She doesn’t even care that he will be tried. It won’t bring her mother back.
She booked her ticket to Paris with the money she had left over. She won’t bring much. Some old clothes, her only shoes, a black and white photograph of her mother and her art book- all that matters to her.
She would be an artist in Paris. She would stop people on the streets of the city of love and ask to draw their portrait. She would charge them for it if they liked it enough to buy it. Maybe, in time she’d try and sell the drawings from her art book. Why not? It is filled with despair, death and hopelessness. It is filled with a life she wishes to forget. And if someone wants to buy it, they can have it. She would be gladly rid of it.
She is strong enough now. She takes a breath of fresh air and looks to the future, as the coffin is lowered inside the ground. She’s leaving this behind. She’s no longer infected with desperation and hopelessness. She stood up for herself, and her mother stood up for her. Her mother didn’t die so that she can remain imprisoned in a little apartment with a monster to suck the life out of her daughter. She’s breaking free from the prison that held her captive for so long, and with her, she’s taking the memory of a truly remarkable woman- her mother.
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