Tag Archives: #fatherhood

A Skeleton in My Family’s Cupboard Is a Skeleton of a Dog

April 20, 2022 Olya Aman Leave a comment

Penetrate the darkness which clouded over the fate of one girl

This story begins in a sheepfold — it associates with kids — gropes its way through dreadful life mutilation, and stops where only death reigns. – Olya Aman

I reveal this tale in the first person — the way it was told to me by my cousin, let it be written. I’ll use all my mastery over the written word to give it the voice and mood of the people involved.

I was guilty of an act of naughtiness every time I had any chance to tax my parents’ patience. How mischievous I was — matters of no moment. You can laugh at my awkwardness, my stammering, and slowness at some other time. My parents were too much absorbed in daily hassles to fight against my whims and screams. I wanted a dog, and when my mom agreed with few objections, I chose the ugliest little creature ever existent. I always was the black sheep of the flock, and my dog was no better. Not any child but me could have picked such a nasty little beast. When my mom was holding my hand in front of a cage with the eight offsprings of our neighbor’s huge German King Shepherd, I saw her scowl at the little baldy black pup — and I knew instantly which one to take home with me.

He was the smallest of the brood and, surprisingly, grew up to be the biggest of the eight. He did everything with a bang; he barked in season and out of it. Dundee, the name I picked to commemorate my love for the famous movie Crocodile Dundee, was mad with rage at cats and rats, and mad with love for kids and chickens. Don’t even ask me why? He had that hearty, downright kindness towards little lady-girls. He would let all children do what they pleased with him, ride on his back, drag him by his tail, pull his ears. Try what not — he was patience and good humor personified. But Dundee licked the faces of girls and only the hands of boys.

It was our second year together when I began to suspect that Dundee was unfaithful to me. I discovered that he had fallen in love with the prettiest thing in our village. The cunning, flirtatious creature was a girl of my age. She had the biggest blue eyes and that rosy mouth of a doll that made people think she constantly was blowing the air out or getting ready to kiss every living thing. But Alisa, that was the name of the girl, was somewhat handicapped. She seemed to live in a dream, talking about flowers and imagining herself to be a dandelion, the abundance of which was a calling card of our place. She danced, not walked, sang instead of talking, and was dressed only in green, and with her hair of a sunny yellow shade, she reminded of the wretched weed indeed.

Her father was a simple and naïve widower. About a month before the dreadful scene, Victor set us all by the ears by bringing the most heartless and deceitful person of the entire region to our remote village. I searched back through the labyrinth of my past to bring back to you the rumors about this vile person because every one of them later, when he’d paid for his deeds, proved to be the truth. He was known to beat his wife when liquor got into his head, which happened way too often. There was definitely a screw loose in his head when it came to pretty young ladies. People saw him quadrupedal in the grass close to the school, doing no one knew what. Victor, Alisa’s father, considered this brutal man to be his friend. Women and men alike scolded Victor for associating with this vile person. We knew the gossips and believed it. But Alisa’s father turned a deaf ear to all those warnings. Victor repeatedly stated that he was saved from robbery and brutal bitting by this man. He paid the debt with respect and trust. Later, we suspected that the man himself organized the attack to get closer to the father of the most charming little flower in our parts.

Victor was overprotective of his stunning little daughter. She was a living proof that one time in his life, a woman loved him and bore him a child paying for this deed with her life. When my scary-looking Dundee saw the pretty thing, he lost his head. From then on, he ran off to her garden and came home only to satisfy his appetite for the leftovers of my mother’s delicious cooking and to spend the night, as was a custom between us, by my bedside. Dundee was devoted to me but, at the same time, adored Alisa. He couldn’t help being always close to this flowery creature. Alisa knew to the smallest detail the unsparing anatomy of my dog’s heart. Somehow they looked like a perfect pair — A Beauty & The Beast. Dundee brushed up his manners and looked a perfect gentle-dog, always smoothing away the creases of her dress and holding in his vast mouth the dandelions she picked.

Try as I might, I couldn’t rummage through my memory for the exact date for the dreadful incident. The closest I can get is to recollect that it happened sometime after my twelve’s birthday. I remember that my mother was still riding the high horse, angry with me for a broken vase and an adventure of a ruined birthday dress.
The date is of no importance, though, as now we are at an unspeakably delicate distance from the heart wrecking events. Those I couldn’t wash from my memory hard as I tried.

Victor never left his precious daughter home alone. Wherever he went, he always took Alisa with him. He had no regular employment, leaving his job as a welder when his wife died. Being a skilled man he was never left without work, helping everyone in the village with everything anyone needed assistance with.

That unfortunate day, a call from his malicious friend forced him to go out late at night. As we learned later, he called at ten p.m. and requested urgent help in some simple but important matter, claiming the occasion not worth explaining on the phone and demanding to see Victor in person. He only said that it would not take long, that they just needed to talk it over in the nearest village pub. Victor should have refused point-blank, but the man insisted, saying he would consider this favor as a payment of the old debt. Victor looked in his daughter’s room. The girl was fast asleep, and he thought somehow it would be ok to leave her for a couple of hours unattended. Little that he knew about the mischievous plot set up by his fraudulent friend.

At the same time, in my room, my furious beast was out of all sorts. It was the only hour when my dog was invariably by my side. I can admit now that I forced Dundee to sleep by my bedside when he would have rather preferred a hut outside in our garden. I was getting ready to sleep and could not get him to calm down. Something stirred him up. Dundee was continuously whining and scratching at the closed door. He never behaved like that before. I gave in and let him go, wondering what the matter with my dog was. We learned from Victor the account of the events that followed. Let me present it in his own narrative.

“I heard the loud barking when I was halfway to the pub where I had the arranged meeting. Dundee almost knocked me to the ground. I should admit, I was scared. The bruit was huge and behaved strangely, pulling the sleeve of my coat and dragging me homewards. I tried to fight Dundee, imploring him to let me go, but to no avail. The creature was out of his mind. Then I had a notion, you know, a tightening in the heart and a loss of regular breath at my throat. Something was amiss with my girl, I thought. Everybody knew about this dog’s devotion to my daughter. How I got back home, I barely can tell. I was running with my heart in my mouth.

“When I approached the house, I saw the light in my daughter’s bedroom and struggled for the key to the door. Not finding one in my pockets, I violently pressed on the door with my whole body and almost cracked my skull when I fell on the floor. The door was not locked! The dog rushed past me, barking viciously all the time. When I entered the room, Dundee was on top of that man. My Alisa was sitting on her bed with her nightdress on the floor and her pretty little face agitated. I covered her in a blanket and ran out of the room to prevent her from seeing the scene of a murder. My side vision couldn’t mistake it for anything else. The villain managed to utter only one frightful cry, and then it was only the sound of growling and chattering. The hip of bloody mass under the fierce dog was past all doctoring.

“I couldn’t help the man. Even then, being so much shaken by what happened, and with my sluggishly working mental powers, I admit, I thought he richly deserved his cruel fate. I needed to save the fragile mind of my precious daughter. By now, she was drawing her breath convulsively. I brought her to my bedroom. Holding her in my arms, I rocked her to and fro, whispering words of tender consolation. I was crying like a baby, hiding my face in the creases of the blanket.”

That was the first thrilling sensation of which all the people of our village were talking for months. The developments that followed began to alter fast. Victor called the police and the ambulance. The death from fatal wounds inflicted by a German King Shepherd named Dundee was stated. The dog, though, was nowhere to find. The law said to put the beast to sleep in a case like that. Police officers and volunteers searched through and through, but they didn’t find Dundee. Alisa was not seriously harmed. I don’t think she realized that her father’s friend, as the man referred to himself when implored the girl to open the door, was about to offend her in any way. He asked her to undress, saying he had a new gown for her, and if she would be a good girl, he would let her try it on. Her mind luckily blotted the other events of that night. She continues to be a beautiful dandelion in her green dress, walking the fields and singing her songs even today.

We seldom talked about the dog. I felt as if treading on the delicate ground each time I mentioned his name. I believed him alive, hiding somewhere. My father told me some years past the true fate of my brave Dundee. At the time of the accident, he and Victor kept it a secret between themselves to make sure the police would not get any notion of what happened. That horrid night Victor called my father, and only when my dad took the dog out of the house and into his van, aiming at his brother’s farm a hundred and fifty miles away, Victor called the ambulance and the police. Shortly after my discovery, I went to my uncle’s farm to learn about my friend’s further life. Here what my uncle said, revealed in his own words.

“Your dog was worth his weight in gold. Take my word for it, dear. He lived a solitary life on my farm, running after the rats and cats and affectionately mothering the chickens. He never expressed any even slight attachment to me or any human being. His heart was forever given to that little flower girl, I think. I often saw him wandering among the fields with a bunch of dandelions in his mouth. He seemed to pass his later years cloudy in the head. Very quiet, very sad. Do you want to see his grave?”

I saw the earth’s elevation under the only tree in a vast field quite far from the house. It was his favorite spot, my uncle said. The very silence of the place seemed to be exaggerated. I battled out of my lethargy and laid a bouquet of dandelions on his grave.

Stay tuned…

Parenting

Kidnapping Can Cast Down for Sure. But Can It Elevate?

July 2, 2019 Olya Aman Leave a comment

Here is a conundrum indeed! How soon can you solve it?

My object in parading this private affair before the reader is to commemorate the remarkable series of events and convey the evidence of what love can build and what it can destroy. – Olya Aman

I present to you here a true story with written evidence that came to my possession through the hands and words of the primary witnesses, who happen to be my friends. I intend to preserve everybody’s incognito in this tale, so let me reveal no names, no places.

Imagine a tiny town where everybody knows each other. If you think this place quiet and unremarkable, you cannot be farther from the truth. People here invent the most mysterious crime affairs to amuse themselves. The outcome of this tale proved to be the zenith of one family’s happiness and, hopefully, the nadir of their troubles.

Mother

I was asked to exaggerate nothing and suppress nothing from what happened more than thirty years ago. My imagination tends to people the darkness of those days with additional terrors sometimes. I’ll do my best to restrain from it.

I used to be a night-club, knock-about-city young girl who was determined to teach herself a lesson by marrying a simple police officer and moving to the smallest town ever existent. After the hubbub and bustle of a big city, I hoped to find soul-soothing serenity in the three-story walls of ancient buildings, corner grocery shops, wooden benches close to every threshold, and the grand loving eyes of my man.

Calm and quiet were showering upon me thick and fast. The monotony of my existence started to grind me away soon enough. I managed to hold the rapture of boredom and adventure starvation for the first three years, and the three that followed were hell for both of us indeed. My husband should have known better than marrying a woman like me.

We were living in constant gnawing anxiety. The real reason for my unhappiness was in my allusion to pain. I was sure that my relationship was lacking the spark. I was longing for emotional suffering and physical agony. It seemed to me that only torture could make me feel alive. The grim orchestra in my head was playing about the passion I lacked and the pain I craved. My tumultuous thoughts were driving me nuts.

I droned my days away in that gloomy town. Household chores: cooking, cleaning, a little bit of reading, and dreaming about some other man beside me, some different life endured. I should have found something to do in that dreary place. But what could I find with my political science degree? Too sophisticated for that place I was.

Oddly enough, only fear still kept us together. My husband, I suspected, feared loneliness and to set everyone’s tongue wagging about our private affairs. I feared my son rejecting me for breaking the family and my inner desire to inflict pain on myself and my husband. Trouble was brewing; I was asking for it.

I anticipated some unfortunate event for some weeks before that day. It started as always with a silent breakfast. Both my husband and I were tired of keeping the picture of a happy family for the sake of our six-year-old son. Mind you, we never as much as raised voice to each other. We simply didn’t talk but for hateful ‘good morning’ and ‘have a good day’.

My husband made his lunch, put a few apples in a bag for our son to take to his grandma, and both of them were gone with the usual ‘see you tonight’. At half-past six, my husband came home. I warmed up his dinner and said, “I will call your mom and ask if they are home by now? I will pick him up and take him to his karate class at seven-thirty.”

I picked the phone and dialed the number. Our son was not there. His mom thought we had some other thing scheduled. My husband grabbed the receiver from my shaking hand and pushed me gently aside. “It’s ok,” he said to his mother. He told her we forgot about some other arrangement and that he was at his friend’s place. What was he talking about? What friend? What kind of arrangement? Those questions were whirling in my head.

This done, my husband looked at me in a strange way. The intensity of his gaze silenced me. It was a look of a hungry, watchful reproach. “I’ll find him. Don’t you worry,” he said, picked up his jacket, and was gone.

Father

My family was always unspeakably precious to me. There was nothing I couldn’t do to save it. Bare it in mind while reading this narrative of mine. I loved my wife more than anything. I knew from the very beginning, she was not the woman a simple chap like me could catch and hold still in his hands. She needed drama, and drama was a rare coin in my native town. I had to mind that currency myself.

It was a custom with us to take our son to my mother’s place, so my wife had a day to herself. She said she needed that time alone, and I submitted. I seldom could say ‘no’ to anything she wanted. I usually drove to the parking lot of a three-story apartment building where my mother lived.

Our son used to get out of the car, give me his ‘see you later, dad’, enter the building and his grandma’s flat on the second floor all by himself. This brief trip gave him a sense of maturity, something to add to his list of ‘I can’.

What was wrong this time? Why wasn’t he at his usual place?

When home again, I said to my wife that I knocked at each and every door of this building, asking about our boy. No one as much as saw him that day. She blamed me, and I, half-expecting such reaction, didn’t object.

She was out of all sorts, now saying in her querulous, rattling whisper how she missed her son, now flinging distinct words of hatred into the air, now shedding a gust of tears and scratching her face, now heaving convulsively barely able to talk, imploring me to do something.

That was her niche in life, her long-awaited drama. So much feeling in every gesture — that was my beastly little girl again. I had to slap her on the face to bring her back to senses.

What an outcome from this insult! I never as much as raised a thought against a woman not talking about a hand. She caught my hand and pressed it to her burning cheek. She kissed it, then higher. My arm, shoulder, collarbone, ear lobe — what an electric shock was going through every little cell of my body! It had ceased to be my own.

The desire we both felt expanded into a series of scenes with pain and pleasure united, angry kisses, throwing each other against all surfaces. Bruising her flesh, she was getting the unsettling inner feeling out, releasing her emotional distress. When all was over, she was lying on a couch in dreamless slumber. I went out into the night to look for our son.

Grandmother

My old, cast-away husband was out of our lives for twenty years. He left us when our son was twelve. Not that he planned it. They sentenced him to three years for a drunken scuffle in a local bar. One man almost died from the severe beating my husband was to blame for. He got out of jail and out of our lives.

On our son’s thirty-second birthday, the old beggar brought his shaking frame to my flat and pleaded to have a chat with his son. I was beside myself with indignation, to say the least. I hated my husband for leaving us. Over a year, he was patiently asking for permission to be a part of our family.

My son and I agreed to see him now and then, with one condition, he had to keep it a secret. My son didn’t mention it to his wife. I never openly met him outside. Were we ashamed of him? He WAS a dosser, after all. Or were we punishing him in this way? I don’t know for sure.

I was angry with myself for being silly and liking, I couldn’t admit at the time, but LOVING was the right word, my husband, during all those years he was away. I couldn’t shake off the inveterate distrust which weighed for all those years on my spirits.

That is why when this alien and strangely familiar person asked to see his grandson, I could only stand rooted in the ‘No’ and ‘Never’. It was a very trying time for me. Eventually, he had tamed me. One day my son and I submitted to his pleadings and promised to arrange everything.

Grandfather

I was old and sick and tired of my lonely life. I had reasons of my own to leave my family. The rods of iron with which prison surrounded me were ever-present in my mind. At some point, I felt that my life was at its lowest ebb. Then and there, like a pitiful mongrel, I crept back meekly to my family. For the first time in my entire life, I humbled myself to pleading for forgiveness with all the patience I still had left in me.

I went to my old hut near the lake. I used to go there in the glorious old days when fishing. This shabby place was creepy, just as I was at that stage of my life. But still, those walls were much better than any bench I used to call home. For over a year, I waited for my wife and son to soften for me. I didn’t put my mind in total blank with the drink. I abandoned this degrading habit because I knew it could force me to lose every inch of the ground I had gained.

The day my son patted me on the shoulder and promised to let me see my grandson, my heart gave a great bound. This news almost turned me giddy. The thought half maddened me with delight. I spent the following couple of days getting ready, putting things in order at my lonely cabin. The little chap needed a cozy place to stay. I exhausted myself with plans for the future rendezvous with my boy. I knew just then — I’d lived through all misfortunes to see my grandson, to get things straight with my son, and to pray for my wife’s forgiveness.

I didn’t remember myself being as tender-hearted as at the moment my son brought this boy in his car on that day. I was fool enough to shed a couple of tears. I wanted to wipe away the wrongs my family suffered through with this last effort of submissive affection. All the gold left of my wasted nature, I poured at the feet of my grandson. I keep the memory of those two days in my heart of hearts.

Son

The air was close and stagnant in that hut. This old man was kind but rude, and he looked almost cruel. I liked him right away, though. How can it be is clean past my comprehension even now, thirty years since? He said, “Don’t middley-coddley, there a good boy. Nothing to be worried about. We’ll have a rattling good time fishing.” The old man said I could call him grandpa, and I did. I knew by my childish instinct, that was seldom wrong, he was my friend.

I remember as if it was yesterday that I never felt myself so mature, so bold and courageous, so skilled and manly. I stayed with this wrinkled weather and life beaten person for two long and memorable days. What a blast! Running in the fields, making birdhouses, playing with the shabby little dog, fishing, and cooking our fish soup over a riverside fire.

My father came with the haste of happiness in his feet in the evening of the second day. I haven’t seen him like that before. I was happy to see this change, and perhaps a little piqued too.

Mother

My husband could not sit down alone to wait through the crisis of our life. He left the house that night after we had the most sensual experience. He remembered that he was leaving an anxious heart at home and phoned me a few times, updating me on the progress of his search. He called me tender names, and I didn’t humor him as I used to.

On the second day in the early evening hours, he came home. I met him with my entire being, imploring for some uplifting news. He didn’t have any. Then I gave him a defiant look, and with mockery, I eagerly blamed him again for what had happened. I should have gone to look for my boy myself. Why did he persuade me to stay at home and wait for some developments? Oh, how my heart sank under a dread. It was beyond words.

Then he confessed. He said he didn’t plan it. We barely exchanged a few words those days, and he simply forgot to tell me he’d arranged for our son to spend a day with his grandfather. I didn’t even know the man existed. My husband never mentioned him. I assumed his father was dead. When he came home and saw my worried look when I was talking on the phone with his mother, only then he felt a plan forming itself in his brain.

He wanted to enliven my love for many years now. He didn’t know how to shake that lethargy I seemed to live in. He said that the pretense of searching for his son, the common disaster he invented, the tears and worries that both of us shared for almost two days brought us together. We were a family, at last, a mother and a father struggling to find their son.

Oh, how mad with rage I was. I called him nasty names. I was storming through our house, smashing the furniture. But in the midst of all those turbulent feelings, there was a glow of hope in me. Hang it all; he was right. I deserved the shock and shake I’d got. I was alive with burning emotions. I breathed passion in the air.

The strange march of events during those two days changed the course of our lives forever. Happy life ever after? Oh, by Heaven, no. But eventful, for sure. We made it a rule always to break the monotony and to meet our passion half-way. When our boy enjoyed time with his grandparents, we had our hurry-skurry adventures. I used to tell him, “Remember it doubly and trebly to make me FEEL your love.”

Stay tuned…