:: h o m e :: :: d o m ::
    Institutionalized
    She made him stand in the middle of the room and strip down.  Shivering all over and hopelessly imploring, he wouldn't dare to disobey.  His trembling voice, Jesus, Mary, please, please no - hit the walls without an echo.  But it was her who finally ran up to him impatiently and pulled half of his clothes up and the other part down as if drawing vertical curtains on him, exposing his most intimate self.  There he was, completely helpless, his pants at his ankles manifesting defeat.
    I'm not sure how long he stood there or whatever happened to him thereafter.  But the fierce moments of his nudity and its context are still with me.  And I wasn't the only one who saw it.  The others and I surrounded him in a coliseum like circle covering every angle.  Together, we generated the humiliation.  Even though neither of us were having our privacy invaded the way he was - right there in front of us, it didn't mean we were safe.  I was threatened by the scene, and the way everybody else was breaking away from it, grabbing onto anything outside of the original radius, didn't help.  Panic and disbelief thickened the air.  I was shocked.
    It was difficult to imagine something like that could ever happen to him regardless of guilt.  He seemed different, as if from a better world, somewhere beyond the hostility of that room and the gray tones of the outside.  His skin, darker in comparison with the chronic paleness of the rest, made him look exotic and sophisticated.  Long lashes and fancy clothes added to that impression, ennobling him in my mind.  He looked like he was from a German catalogue.  
    However hard it had been for me to relate to him before, I suddenly felt a strong connection when he stood there naked.  And I could somehow understand why he wouldn't stop pleading even after the fact, after it was already done.  I realized that in fact there were no rules I could hold onto, that the future offered no reassuring guarantees.  All promises vanished the moment I saw him naked.  I moved on from there tainted by the reality of the unbelievable.
    I remember things following a rather peculiar path ever since my mother brought me there the first time.  Without much effort I see myself there that day, right down to the finest details of what I was wearing and how it felt climbing those stairs toward the big front door behind which I was to see the world from a brand new perspective.  I had no expectations at the time, only fears and insecurities.  Handed over to a complete stranger and sat amongst an array of unfamiliar faces, I gave into what I sensed was my committal.  It was my initiation into a group of people I was suddenly assigned to, and the first link in a chain reaction of randomly sampled situations.
    That building and its backyard became the center of the universe, where all the gravity concentrated and around which everything else revolved.  I was pulled into it forcefully, unconsciously letting myself get sucked in.  I followed the cracks in the bathroom ceiling listening to the terrifying story of the czarna lapa, the black hand that lived somewhere within the concrete, crawling out only when ready to attack.  Girls would go pee in pairs, rushing with eyes fixed closely at the darkest section of the rift.  I believed Norbert, the one with the poorest reputation around, that he did indeed put snot in my soup, even though he couldn't have since I was so busy gobbling it up; he convinced me otherwise.  I feared the vicious dog from across the far wall of the back yard, which we would watch gathered around a small opening nobody but us knew about.  Occasionally we could see a little blue light coming from his kennel, the ultimate sign of evil powers.  I didn't like the strange men who came every Christmas dressed as Santa Claus and who would insist on me sitting on their laps for the picture.  I felt myself stronger when I looked at Marcin, whom I  loved unconditionally.
    As much as it wasn't hard to forget oneself, even that presented a challenge since free spiritedness was considered a serious offense and the taste of the consequence practically entered our blood stream.  However, learning from one's own mistakes was surprisingly unpopular.  "Fun" became a dangerous business and one tried to go about keeping a low profile.  Far from blissful, this lifestyle left us longing for the voices of our mothers and fathers we would hear through a loudspeaker at the end of each such day.  Counting down those minutes became a ritual, a prelude to salvation.
    I’m not sure how much anything changed after the lady who was taking care of us ran up to that wretched kid and terrorized us with his naked body.  My mind, overwhelmed by random memories of that time doesn’t offer much information.  It speaks in a pungent, color saturated fashion.  And even though it appears now as an extremely distant, disconnected era, somehow I don’t let it go.  Contrast is still coming in, whether it’s a blessing or a curse; it becomes a filter through which I see everything else.  Whenever I’m back home and see that building, the front door at the top of the winding stairway, I feel like nothing did change. 

San Francisco 2003
©2009  Natalia Szostak
   


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