The Grove
It was a rather impulsive act I committed in my youth. What prompted me to this brutal act against my grandmother has been unclear to me as she was not such a wicked person who deserved that kind of miserable consequence. I can still vividly remember her dying eyes helplessly staring at me, and the surprised expression of dismay on her face smeared with blood. Not being able to understand what had happened and why I had done that, her final resistance took place in delirium, and she fell down. Her blood all over him and I.
It was a hot summer day. I was on vacation and spent most days in summer with one of my new friends I had met sometime last spring. He was a very quiet boy, expressionless, but with a vague sense of intimacy; with him I felt complete. There were so many similarities between us; it was almost as if we were two parts to the same person.
As usual, he and I were playing outside not far away from my house. Actually, you could see my house from where we were then, when there were no buildings standing in-between, like it is now. All that could be found there were a series of monotonous farm fields on slightly rugged topography. He and I were building a hut at the edge of a small grove. The sun was directly over head and beat down on us, but we went on building the plain, fragile hut until late afternoon.
The hut was small, but once we were inside it seemed large enough for two kids. The sense of small accomplishment and the cool environment eased our excitement, putting both of us to a small sleep until dusk came when the pleasant smell of burnt leaves gently woke me up. He liked to smoke, and so did I. I was not addicted, as I did it only once in a while, just a little entertainment for a kid in an unexciting countryside. We grew it right there; every summer we harvested, although not quite large an amount, enough to make some profit by selling it to students at school.
The place was never to be found by other people. We chose an area where nobody visited, though even if they had, the plants were almost unrecognizable among the mosaic colors of other plants. But the day was special, the day of fate, or it may be more appropriate to conclude it the doomsday, because my life in a sense ended there. My grandmother found our bicycles parked at the entrance path of the grove and came towards us just to find out what we were up to and, of course, the smell of smoke warned her. Her angry face turned away and she walked toward my house.
It was a big deal back then, that my grandmother might inform my parents what I was up to, although when I thought about it again years later on, I felt it was not such a big deal, as all I would have suffered from it would be a mere domestic punishment from parents, unlike the never-fading sense of guilt and fear the decision had brought to us.
We caught up with her at the front yard of my house. I tried to explain and asked her not to tell, but she did not want to listen. She was one of my relatives I did not like so much, even before that incident: her arrogance and conservative attitude and daily annoyance justified my anger, and gave excuse to my young mind, that concluded she deserved to go to hell. As she walked away I hit her head hard from behind with one of the many hand axes stored alongside the garage wall. Hit so many times that I lost count. The spattering blood, the sound of crushed skull, the inarticulate cry of grandmother, and my fast heartbeat almost made me faint. My friend was alongside, striking her with me. The true refreshment of mind and body in my whole life, past and future, all came to this moment. A savage joy rose in my heart, and nothing else seemed to matter. It was like a dream.
Then the fear and regret took over. When we realized what we have done it was too late. The implications of this act in society were clear, and I had to accept that what seemed such a foreign experience, what we saw only in News and TV scenarios finally came true that day. We were certainly upset, but not as much as other people might have become in the same situation. We shared a sort of numbness, a sense of detachment from our personal life and society, and it helped us in a way to prevent a nervous breakdown on the spot. Fortunately, nobody could have been able to witness our murder as it was between my garage and the house, a very small gap between tall brick walls. If anything had seen us, it was a bunch of crows resting on the electric wire above us. We watered the massive amount of blood away with a field hose, then stuffed her mouth and wound with wads of toilet paper (to prevent the dripping blood), and wrapped her head before we completely wrapped her body up with large, old, unused curtains stored in the garage.
We changed our clothes, and threw away the bloody clothes into the box which would later be thrown away into the school�s incinerator. We did not know what to do with the body, though my parents would be home in no time. Maybe we really were panicking, if not so how could we choose to bury the body in the grove just a few hundred feet away from my house?
We carried the body with a dolly, when it was dark enough. We got there, and hurried to get this job done. I took the dolly back to the house garage in case (although most unlikely) my parents came home and wondered where it had gone. We dug deep into the hard mossy soil, as deep as we could. We did not want the eroded soil to expose the bones in later years. The hut was right next to us, and the same kind of obsession propelled us and the sense of accomplishment followed, but this time with a great ease. And with the ease, my strained muscles sent pains all over my body. I told him nobody would ever find it here, but he didn�t say anything. He told me "goodbye" and left.
When I got home, it was already 10pm. My parents were already back, and I told myself to act normally, not to raise any sorts of suspicions later when the disappearance of grandmother became widespread around the community and the police started searching for her tracks. My mother was in the kitchen, and she did not seem to care about my coming home late that night. She turned to me and smiled like usual, as if nothing had changed. It was then I felt a heavy strike in my heart. From then on, people around me would be the same just like yesterday, but I have done something they have never done, I know something about myself they will never know and my life would never be the same in the way it was before.
I went straight into bed as I sought the sense of oblivion I had every night, with which you can create a certain distance between today and yesterday. What I was the day of the incident was going to be the foreign experience of a complete stranger when I woke up. Everything had happened in my dream. It was already midnight; I closed my eyes and fell asleep quickly.
I slept until 11 o�clock and woke up just like a usual day in the weekend. Everything seemed back to normal, and long hours of sleep made me forget the horrible experience, if not completely forgotten, to a degree of it being like a long past experience. Soon I found out the day was going to be rough when I saw the police car parked in our front yard. A short, chubby officer was asking my parents about grandmother. My parents were rather calm, and even my father who is a kindred to grandmother did not seem so upset, but certainly worried to some extent. Grandmother lived a mile or so away from where we were, and she lived with my uncle�s family. They owned many fields and one was located at a few blocks away from back of our house, so that she often visited us on her way back and forth.
The police was going to question me as well, and I had to prepare a respectable and natural response in order to avoid any suspicion being aroused. I was very anxious and felt extremely weird; my parents being present in the same place, my parents who had no idea of the truth. But after all I went though it alright. Told the officer I was at home playing video games, just like any other teenager. The officer seemed to have not even the slightest suspicion against thirteen year old boys with innocent, modest appearances. I had a reputation of being a good boy at home, the neighbourhood, and school; it seemed almost offensive to hold any doubt against me.
A few days passed and people gave up on her chances for survival. The police believed somebody had robbed and killed her but who expected an old farmer to come to work her fields carrying valuable items. Some believed she was attacked by wild animals, like a bear or wolves, perhaps. I felt bad for what I had done, betraying people who loved me and cared for me. I felt so badly for actually feeling at ease and scorning the incompetence of the police. As they could not find any traces of her, the case went unsolved after a month or so. My uncle�s family grieved over her disappearance, especially my grandfather wouldn�t believe her death for a long time, and since then he has been in delicate health. I avoid him, because his sorrowful expressions remind me of that day and make me feel terribly guilty. I wanted to part from all my childhood memories and the fact my that grandmother had existed, but my thoughts sometimes got all tangled up and I sometimes didn�t know if I even existed or not; I hoped I didn�t every time I fell into such confusion.
Years have passed, and years have been lost. I did not try to speak to anybody, unless it was necessary to do so. I locked myself up in my small room most of the time but was still a good boy, whose superficial attitude seemed very comfortable and admirable to many adults, with academic transcripts of straight As. I moved to a city when I entered university, and it was a relief because there will be nobody who knows about me there, nothing that reminds me of memory of that day, and I just wanted to be far away from home, the home where I had always to make sure the curtain was shut in my room because I could accidentally see the grove a mile away through the window and the every sight of the grove chilled me so bad I could not stop shivering in the solitary dark room.
* * *
A decade passed since then; I have finished university and worked as an associate professor at the university. Years have passed since the incident and the memory of the experience faded and blurred, but it did not mean that I have been liberated from the deep agony rising from nowhere particular, but from everywhere in my mind, not being able to figure out the very cause of this unbearable feeling. The horrifying images of the murder haunt me, the grove they have left repel all my attempts to logically understand the phenomenon occurring within my mind. On one hand I tried to explain my behaviour and reason why I needed to do it, or simply why I did it; on the other hand I tried to debase and refute the entire value of moral justice in the society. The ultimate joy and savage ecstasy seemed to explain the true meaning of life, which justified my behaviour; the morality or the faith constrains us and leads us to self-destruction and self-denial through imposition of the ideal model, which we were meant to fit into, but actually never close to it. We are intoxicated, in this artificial way of life. I too, was intoxicated, until that day when I noticed what life was all about. Just a chain of actions led by constant intuitions, really, and is nothing more.
Such attempts of justification did not work sometimes, because for it to be successful I have to be in a state of constant awareness, which is an extreme difficult thing to achieve, as both physical and mental weariness resulting from the internal confrontation and pursuit of the reasoning made me weak and vulnerable. The confusion took me over, and my solitary life was full of agony, but there was no possible way to call for help, I had to face the misery until the memory and feelings faded into further degrees of oblivion.
Communication always failed for me. Personal involvement with other individuals was to be avoided, as it was almost impossible for me to create a sense of intimacy with others with such a secret, and random outbreaks of internal upheavals of self-criticisms left no room for others. Speaking of intimacy, I remember my old friend who was the only one who shares the secret, who moved abroad with his family a few weeks after that day. I still remember the day we had first met at the river a few miles away from my old home. He was fishing, and I was also; fishing by then had become one of my favourite hobbies. For a few seconds I hesitated in speaking to him but he spoke to me briefly, and we ended up having fun together talking about many unimportant things. He said he lived around there, but I actually never visited his house, because his parents were disagreeable. One day I started yearning to see him again, for the mere curiosity and the reason he was the only one who shared the experience, and probably because he was the only friend I�ve ever felt close to.
But there were no information available. The high school did not store old information and things had changed so much in a last decade that the riverside where we had met was completely converted into an area of fancy houses and cottages. My house was still there in the same way it was a decade ago, except the more beautiful gardens with variety of plants and flowers, which my mother ardently took care of especially since she needed to find some sorts of fulfillment of life after my father died a few years ago from lung cancer. I sometimes visited her to make sure she was doing ok by herself, and making sure she was not sad, only because I could not help and sustain her when she fell into a depression; I myself felt very weak, and I wished she would forever stay in an illusion of happiness.
The grove, ironically, was still there, unchanged and untouched, against all my invocations that the grove would have been gone by then, the past began to reflux and the forgotten sense of discomforting frustration welled up in my throat. For a moment I regretted returning, only to reset all my effort of these years of intoxication, and come back to the awakened mery of re-creating the scene in my mind, yet my yearning for my old friend did not contradict the desire to destroy the past� as I needed him for getting clear of my past in a real sense. Rather than being attacked from ambiguous horror and anxiety from all directions in my mind, it was better that I accept one single truth and face it. And murder? So what? It was just one simple event among the many others I was born to go through and nothing more. Destiny made me make that certain choice and it was absolute truth beyond my control, and what I could do about it? Just accept the way I was meant to be and will be meant to be, and the acceptance might contribute to my transcendence, beyond an ordinary life constructed upon an illusory world of good and evil�But am I strong enough to endure such pressure, guilt and fear always dominating my logic? That was why I needed him, the only one with whom I could share my pain with, regain my strength with.
A few months later, I begun to fancy something extremely absurd, but something that could not be completely denied since my unpredictable mental state lacked some credibility... The more I thought of it the less certain it seemed to be; that the boy was a duplication of myself I had created since the incident, to divert the direct psychological shock from the aftermath. What most reinforced this idea was the fact that I did not remember his name. Then what had become the slightest relief, a sort of hope for salvation I saw through him collapsed, and my life fell to its lowest.
An impulsive fragment of memory suddenly flushed in my mind, and I gave it the last chance to affirm the existence of the boy; the grove stored our memories, both bitter and sweet ones. The dead body and time capsule. The time to return the place where I was most afraid even to think about it, but that day the fear was prevailed upon by desire for the truth. It was a cloudy day in October, and strong wind was blowing through trees making pattering noises in which I felt insecure. The place we buried her body was almost unrecognizable, as bushes grew over extensively around the point, which was a little relief. The box was buried at the foot of the tall birch tree and was easy to be spotted. My small shovel hit a small tin box that was buried under a foot or so. Inside the box found were the various objects familiar in my childhood, and a couple of letters written to us in future. His name was there, clearly written. Two letters possessed no identical feature at all, thus very unlikely that one person could write in such different handwritings and style. The content of the letters was insignificant. It was then I was sure he had actually existed! But then, where is he now? The hope revived in me, and it was my last chance of survival.
When I finally found a trace of him a few days later, it was my turn to fall for eternity. I found him himself. The old local newspaper inserted an article that sought the information of a missing woman, next to which article sought another, of a missing boy of thirteen. Pain in my arms made me twitch. I felt so cold. Under the grey sky I felt forsaken. In the grove of pattering leaves, I felt so alone. Rain begun to fall, washing away my blood and soul, in the remnants of the hut I once again yearned for the solace from life. Where am I going, an emancipation or infinite agony? Only one thing I noticed in my life; this place did not belong to me, neither did I belong to it. I was neither a superman nor a justifier of life. I regret now, the way I chose my life to be, and the fact I actually tried to persist in my life of mistakes; and the world itself seemed a mistake.