ALEXANDR KAN. The Origin of an Apparition, or the Story of a True Passion

ALEXANDR KAN. The Origin of an Apparition, or the Story of a True Passion

As the most memorable reminiscence  of my childhood there remains  to this day a strange game I played with my older sister, when we were left alone in an empty house and the emptiness, like the air of life, surrounded us, since we did not have a father—he had remained in a faraway country as a true patriot of his land, and our mother, or, to be more precise, her shadow, filtered into our home only late at night, perhaps over there at the workplace, finding refuge from the horrors of “an international marriage” broken by the clash of two political regimes that suddenly discovered the impossibility of coming to terms with each other And so the game went as follows: when my sister, for quite a few then-incomprehensible reasons, was m a bad mood, she would lock me in the bathroom, or, to be more specific, she would find any convenient reason whatever to take me in the most polite manner into the dark little cubicle of the bath facilities and tightly close the door, thus removing me from the living space, and only then would she begin her peaceful existence: preparing for school, merrily chatting with her friends over the phone, and even (this was the most terrifying for me) inviting some guests over. The gist of the horror of my condition was the possibility that those guests walking freely around our home would discover my strange situation, but even worse was the fact that the door, behind which I silently suffered m my imprisonment, had never been latched and could be locked only from inside—i.e., from my side. As a matter of fact, no one kept me imprisoned, and I could leave my confinement at any time, but precisely such a moment of willful exit would initiate a whole series of endless moral punishments imposed by my despotic sister. One can thus say that the essence of the game amounted to a check-up on my meek spirit, and I must openly admit that quite often I was not able to withstand such torture. Hence, when, years later, many interviewers, including friends, teachers, students, and drinking companions, would ask me a trivial question about my most striking memory from childhood, I had no choice but either to keep a stubborn silence or to spin some sort of optimistic nonsense, often stealing someone else’s recollections and passing them off as my own, thus perhaps consoling myself that if I had been asked a question about my darkest reminiscence from childhood, I would probably have answered like an absolute champion.