hangs an enormous painting depicting the sea. Emma painted it a few months after we’d met, but I had it framed a few weeks ago. The painting must be three by five meters. Apart from a lighthouse far to the left, the canvas is filled by the sea and foaming waves. Hundreds of dark-blue nuances have been painted with a brush, giving the impression of never having been lifted from the canvas. The artist seems never to have hesitated. The technique suggests an aggressive impatience. It must have been inside her. Somewhere.
You see what you’re looking for.
You see the sort of things that are within yourself.
I must have known that there was something about Father. Intuitively I already knew that there was something about Father when I was very small. I knew it during my school years. This knowledge was no more than a twitch in my eyelid. No more than the ripples on the surface of the bathwater. I carried the secret around in the same way you constantly carry around the decisive moments in life.
You know about them both before and after they have taken place.
I knew about my father’s secrets. I knew that life is not for all time. I knew that in the end you always stand alone. I knew that my free will was my greatest enemy. How did I know?
I can’t explain that.
Our father, Boxer Bloom, the wisest and most just animal in our city.
When the secret was on its way to reach conscious awareness, like the sand that inexorably runs out of the hourglass, I turned the glass upside down again. Then I did the same thing again and again and again. But with the years I didn’t have the strength to resist.
Was it maturity? Perhaps simply fatigue? It wasn’t courage.
I had learned to see through the underlying structures of society. On the other hand, the breeze in my fur in the twilight can go right by me. I don’t perceive the aroma of boxwood or the sun’s warmth against my nose.
Shame hides when we’re not searching for it.
Shame’s best hiding place is right in front of our eyes.
Father always worked late. This wasn’t strange. It was better to correct the pupils’ papers at the office than to drag everything home. There were conferences to prepare for and carry out. A series of social activities demanded his presence.
It happened that I saw him sitting in the car on the school’s parking lot, conversing with one of the other teachers. Perhaps it was a female teacher? That wasn’t strange. A rector was no better than his teachers. A rector’s priorities must be respected.
On one occasion they got out of the car just as I was walking across the parking lot. I didn’t ask him why they’d been sitting in the car.
I never asked him.
It was my fault, and I am living with that.
There are philosophers who maintain that evil is passivity. In our secularized, transparent, and democratic city, passivity is the only kind of evil that remains. All others have been rooted out. Taken into custody. All other kinds of evil can be controlled and limited.
So it’s said.
Rhetoric. Empty rhetoric. Nothing is new under the sun.
The unwillingness to help a stranger has to do with laziness. It has to do with cowardice. The result of laziness and cowardice is passivity, but we can read about the reasons behind it in theology.
Laziness and cowardice.
I was not blind to my shortcomings. Nonetheless, I wasn’t able to confront Father. You speak of codependency with regard to substance abuse. Those who are close to the substance abuser make themselves a part of the behavior by not confronting it. That isn’t passivity, it’s guilt.
Father’s cowardice became my cowardice.
I hope that his guilt was as hard to bear as mine.
I have excuses. There are always excuses. I was forced to transform my amazing father, the unsurpassable Rector Bloom, into a cowardly wretch who didn’t dare admit that he was unfaithful. That was asking a lot. While I was growing up I had filled the image of my father with everything I respected in life. When I realized the truth, it was not just Father who fell from his pedestal.
It was my life that came crashing down.
Eric already knew. He didn’t care. He kept silent.
I did, too. Every morning my father met my mother in the kitchen with a big smile, a warm embrace, and a cup of coffee. It was my fault that her life became false and distorted in