Hoods and Bots: Part Twelve by Irena Szirtes

credit: Canva/Irena Szirtes

 How do you sleep when pain savages your body, when there’s hunger cramps but no appetite, when your throat burns for want of fluid? When you lie in a stone cell, chilled to your core? How can you rest when you were beaten with clubs and rifle butts, kicked again and again in the ribs, then flung down stairs into the dark like a rag? 

“Make your bed there, Hood,” she’d hissed, “where inmates died of Bubonic Plague, where rats performed just punishments.” 

She’d been willowy, with beautiful doe-like eyes, the sort men might  believe incapable of cruelty. But she’d been acid-tongued as a witch, and strong as any man. 

  Your senses are in overdrive; you can hear distant cries of distress, barely perceptible drips of water, light switches somewhere nearby, muffled footfall as guards patrol the corridors. You know tomorrow is execution day. Your emotions free fall, as overwhelming urges to live vie with everything  you believe. Is there a way out? Could you pay lip service to Benson Parry, and carry on as you were, hidden in the base?  But that option is for citizens, never for Hood. You hear Carla, and this time she seems to rebuke you, “Danger is always with us. Better to court it with what’s right, than with what’s  wrong.” 

Your forebears speak too, from Belsen, from Auschwitz, from the Polish resettlement  camps, an array of men and women with pale faces, shaved heads, imbued with almost indecent resilience and strength.  My uncle, who probably died under torture, shakes his head, bitterly disappointed, and I hear my father, whose shouts were heard as he walked toward the scaffold:

“My death is a seed! Seeds might sleep for years, but then they split hard ground and break boulders! Every Resistance death is seed, and one day forests of freedom will grow! Fight, fight, always fight!” 

Even Paweł, whose compassion had seemed to make him more accessible, now chides me : “Fight as hard as you must.”

 You are Imiołczyk:  you wish you weren’t, but you are. You know you’re not ready, that life should carry on underground, hidden from Regime view. But you see death hurtling toward you, grimly determined on its collision course. 

  You tell yourself those before you endured worse far longer, and fear you may not show the courage they did. You agonise over what you might reveal if they... and you can’t begin to contemplate the worst.  The best you can hope for is swift execution. 

  Then your life parades itself before you. You regret not speaking with your mother often enough since she moved. You regret never telling her how much you appreciate her efforts to give you the best possible start, despite being suddenly and cruelly widowed. You remember how, as a small child, you’d instinctively known she’d have died for you, just as Carla said, and realise she probably still would. Then there’s Bhuresi – dear Bhuresi! She’s life-force personified, and you realise you never saw that she too, made sacrifices you took for granted. It’s crystal: she said she never wanted marriage or children for herself, yet still found buckets of love for a little girl who couldn’t understand where her daddy and favourite uncle had gone. 

 And what rushes you like a burgeoning flood? The need to try, despite the struggle, to forgive your husband.  It’s strange: you know you’ll never tell him now, but despite all you said, and despite all he did, you finally understand Bhuresi was right: you still love him. You hadn’t  admitted it to yourself,  but now you are about to die, there’s no escaping truth. It won’t make the slightest difference to him, because he’ll never know, but it makes a difference to you. You want to rid your whole being of the bitter toxins determined to hinder your recovery from betrayal trauma, determined to poison the rest of your life, however long or short it might be. But it’s complicated. You don’t want forgiveness to suggest what he did was ok.  It still hurts. You still wouldn’t stop the divorce, though he’s been delaying it all he can. To stop it would mean betrayal might happen again, and you can’t  contemplate that, so you go round in circles: forgive or not forgive? And despite the conflict, if you could see just one person before you die, it would be him. 

 You fret about the dogs too. You wonder if they’re looking out his window, anticipating your return, and you weep, but are so very glad they were banned from this mission. Thank God they’re safe! Thank God? Thank who? 

You realise  you never gave God, if He exists, a second thought. You wonder about Him, because many Imiołczyks were motivated by deeply-held beliefs. One devout ancestor, Wilhelm, saved Jews and non-Jews alike by forging identity papers and arranging  safe passage; others suffered for resisting  Stalin’s enforced atheism. There were Protestant and Catholic Imiołczyks, all British citizens, fighting side by side as recently as WW3, but no one paid much heed to God in the 2080s. You wonder if the 2080s have it right or wrong. And was it faith that moulded Paweł's thinking, faith stronger than Resistance philosophy, when he saved that young German’s life, when he refused to become what he hated? For the first time in your life, when there is nothing but hours left, you decide to pray. What is there to lose? 

 You don’t  have the nerve to ask for deliverance; there’s an instinct, as death draws near, you don’t deserve answers  - even for modest prayers - but you hope God  will understand and somehow make a way for you, that perhaps He’s better than you ever thought He was. You give Him permission, if He’s there, to help you find real forgiveness inside yourself for your husband, and add you hope He might find the same for you. You admit you enjoyed being spiteful to Frank, and shamed him in front of others; that you don’t  understand what the implications of forgiveness would be if you somehow escaped execution and got home. You say it’s so hard, because though you won’t take Frank back, you long for that relationship to be how it used to be. You wish you could be who you used to be, but you will always be someone different now, because you can’t come out of betrayal trauma the person you once were. 

Then you go off at a tangent, bellow and rage at God, roar your frustration, because life is disappointing, cruel, such unmitigated shit. There! You use a word should never pass an Imiołczyk lady’s lips! Once God has borne the full brunt of your rage and more, you are empty, worn out, and sleep fitfully, drifting in and out of time. It’s still dark when you wake again, and realise you understand something  for the very first time: forgiveness and trust are two very different things. Forgiving Frank would not mean I’d have to trust him again, because trust would have to be repaired bit by bit, by his words and actions, over time. You feel enlightened, so you  whisper “OK, God, if that’s You, I’m in.” And while your body shakes and aches and your throat still burns, you feel spite and bitterness begin to leech away, and something sweet, strong and warm washing over you. You bask in that for a while, even fall asleep in its embrace, until you wake once more with your real enemies on your mind.

“No,” you say to God, “that’s different. I can’t begin to think about forgiving Victor and Roland, and the Bots who killed my father, or made my uncle disappear. That’s a much taller order.”

  You realise you only saw the tip of ancestral anger, that fateful day at the ancient oak, that you ‘ve never truly faced its depth, let alone processed  it. You realise doing so might take more time than you've  got. You hope that God, if He’s still listening, might be ok with that, because to say you’d work it out  ‘one day at a time’ would be stupid. Maybe a moment at a time is enough. It will have to be, it’s all you’ve got.