The Enraged Orphan
She was an orphan, no mother and no father, and she was beautiful!
Love embraced her with its tenderness and filled her heart with a unique and unknown joy. This love didn’t just fill her chest, but also her womb with a child. Where she lived, at that time, a child without marriage was called a bastard, a child of shame. The old man accepted to wed her and adopted her child to protect them from the claws of her society. The fruit of love transported her from the innocent enamored teenager to the melancholic wife of the good old man. Surely, all the neighbors were aware of what happened, but no one knew who were the lover and the father. They showed their respect and admiration to the good old man and their contempt for the disgraceful whore!
On this background of fear and shame, she bore her bastard for 9 endless months, waiting impatiently for the day of deliverance when she would finally get rid of her sin, the sin that made her the talk of the village.
To save the newborn bastard from a sure death, as the habits called for back then, the old man fled with his young wife to where no one knows them, to where she can deliver this hated fetus, this unwanted child, the fruit of her blind passion, and her innocent ignorance.
He was born on a beautiful spring day. He was beautiful and soft like his mother. They stayed hiding in this remote place until the child reached the age when the killing of bastards is not allowed anymore.
As soon as they returned to their home village, she left the old man, forsook her son, and escaped away from this hostile and mean environment. She abandoned him with her old husband, while he was still drinking milk from her breast. He grew up, not knowing his real father, forsaken by his mother, in the house of the old man and his children.
As soon as he reached an understanding of the things of life, his stepbrothers and his neighbors made sure he knew about his awkward and humiliating situation. When the old man got nearer to his final departure, the boy realized that there would be no one left to protect him from the harshness and injustice of his world. He would become a slave to his brothers, working in their father carpentry shop from dawn to dusk.
He was sad almost all the time. He tried to inquire about his mother and her whereabouts, and what he learned came to him as the last nail in the coffin of his depressing childhood. He was told that she is living in a nearby town, trying to make a living by providing the men of the county with their desired pleasures. Among her regular customers were the sons of the old man! Everyone chanted her unique beauty and her unlimited giving…He wanted to escape to a far away place, where nobody knows him, where he can be forgotten and he can enjoy a bit of peace of mind and tranquility, but he was still a boy and he didn’t have the necessary courage to undertake this journey. He spent his nights in deep contemplations about his life, his luck, his fate and the evil of humans. He read everything that came under his hands, seeking answers to all what happened and still happening to him, while he didn’t choose any of it. Long nights during which he searched and looked into the meaning of all that, repeating to himself the same question: “God, why, why me?”
Few years passed, the boy became a young man, well built and strong from his endless days working in the shop. His face was tainted with a constant sadness and a deep disappointment, veiled with a sort of a philosophical conviction that the key question is not “why”, as this will never have a complete answer, but the true question is “how” can a man live without any answer to the “why” question?
Along side this conviction, a strong rage was rooted in the heart and soul of this young and handsome man: a rage against his biological father, the coward traitor; a rage against his mother, the foolish quitter; a rage against his mean stepbrothers, his ruthless neighbors, and his harsh environment and its ignorant traditions and unjust values; a rage against every human who contributed to his miserable life, every soul who didn’t try to alleviate the suffering of his soul and every spirit that didn’t help him to overcome his fear of the coming days, this same fear that led him often times to ideas of death and suicide. Sadness, disappointment and rage shaped the personality, the thoughts and the values of this forsaken son, rejected boy, enslaved and tortured teenager.
One day, he finally felt ready to leave and live on his own, away from his original home, the home of the old man, the only man that ever gave him any kind of affection, the only man he loved, even though deep down in his mind, and for a long time he blamed him for saving his hated bastard life, when he fled with his mother to his place of birth. He decided to leave, to show the entire world what the bastard, son of a whore and slave of poverty and need, can do! He wanted to show all of them that the son of ignorance will become the father of knowledge and the slave of shame will become the master of pride. He left to make from all people his spiritual slaves, slaves in their souls, in their convictions, in their joys, in their hopes, in their lives, in their sufferings and in their deaths! For all these reasons he left and he loved all women, and more particularly the so-called whores. He returned and boasted about his intimate knowledge of the deepest corners of the soul. He abolished the past and its archaic values. He invited the people to follow him and serve him. He despised the traders of objects and flesh and he put down their stinking enterprises. He came back and repudiated families, mothers and fathers. He disowned his mother who brought him to his suffering, he kept away his beloved who wanted to carry a son that would be like him in his shame and misery. He rebuked every friend who wanted to acquire the knowledge needed to break free from his hold. Finally, he renounced his own life when this latter didn’t allow him to continue to stand against all the things he refused, and when it started to deprive him from his pride and to put doubt in his convictions and truth. He decided to die when he felt that he is starting to lose from his rage, hoping that his death will allow him to complete the realization of his design against all the injustice he saw and experienced in his life. His rage was perfect, strong, rooted, flawless, and it stayed as such until his last breaths when his resolve faltered for few seconds, and he said, just before he died, and for the first time after a long time of believing in the uselessness of this question: “my father, my father, why have you forsaken me?”
Indeed, his last thought was about his unknown father, and his last question was “why”, knowing that the answer is not from this world, and hoping that this time, unlike all other times when he asked this question, the answer might come after few seconds.