Heaven, Hell

Heaven, Hell

         I lag behind, my hand shielding my eyes from the blinding sun as I observe my father making his way in front of me. The last few meters to the summit of the mountain are the hardest; they sap the last vestiges of your strength, strip you to the bone of anything you had at the base of the mountain. Only the strongest can make it, and even they do not make it unchanged.  It is amazing, how as far as up towards heaven the branches grow, so far the roots sink down into the hell below.
         He reaches the peak at last and after catching his breath looks around, squinting in the sun, to look at what he has conquered. I am surprised – there is no happiness on his face, no sign of rejoicing, only the sweat and memories of labor. A brief respite remains, and then the long journey home.
                   It is summer, and we are all in shorts and t-shirts. Behind my mother and sister who are making their leisurely way, quickly gaining is my older brother, only two years younger than my sister and a contrast in every sense of the word. Physically, of course, he could not be more different.  Stocky and powerfully built, thick black hair falls into his brown eyes. But the true difference between them can be seen in those eyes – they are single mindedly focused on their goal, and although he has just now stopped to help my mother up after a fall, he bounds up the mountain with a determination that makes the boulders on either side of him look weak in comparison. His gaze is riveted by the figure at the top of the mountain, just as mine is. We are alike in temperament, my brother and I, and we both share a mutual hero: the dark haired, passionate form of our father, clad in khaki shorts and a collared red shirt. My brother is toiling, racing to reach him, but I know that my father cannot be reached. Even as my brother calls out a hail, he twitches, turns slightly, but is so lost in thought that he barely hears.

         My father is dark haired despite his fifty-some years, and he has worn a beard for as long as I can remember. My mother says he grew it out when he was in the army, before my sister was born, and could never be bothered to completely shave it off afterwards. I secretly think differently, however; it is simply another facet to his mystery, for it too has its own story. His nickname is Brada, the Bearded One in Bosnian. It was a long time before I learned who gave him the name.
         Grimacing slightly, showing a set of teeth that are perfect, but not his own, my father pushes his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose. A permanent line is etched between his eyes, another testament to his character. What sort of man can frown that much and still have the will to live? Many ask him, and I do not know what answer he gives, but I think it is because he laughs with all the force with which he glares. A man of passion, those lines on his face say. I can only hope my face will one day be lined so.

         He is tall, vital, strong – perhaps his stomach is rounder than I remember it being when I was younger, but it only adds to his stature.  The long legs that are lounging so beneath him are well-muscled, but the muscle is scarred in places. Five indentations the size of pebbles are scattered across his calves, behind his knee, and above his ankle. They have been there for as long as I can remember, and I called them his craters before I found what they actually were. I suppose it is always something of a shock to find out that one’s father’s body is dotted with the scars of bullet holes. When I asked him, seven years old and painfully direct, his eyes took on a shadowed look. Scars, he told me then. Over the next two years the explanation was slowly fleshed out: scars he got in the war, then they became bullet holes, and finally he told me the story behind each wound. One by one. He could not yet speak of them all at once. At first I was impatient, or perhaps just too young to see the not-yet-healed memories come to the surface whenever I mentioned the subject. My sister and brother routinely had to hush me up or to bribe me with trips and sweets to keep me from beleaguering him with questions, until I realized that they too did not know all the answers and were afraid to learn them.
         My father’s smile can brighten up a room. It is the kind of charisma he has, the ability to turn things in his favor, the ability to change those he looks upon. I remember, as though through a fine mist, that his smile was once different. When I was a little girl it was a rare enough occurrence in itself, for in those days he had been dark, forbidding, austere, a man plagued by a past I could not even begin to guess at. Still, when the smile appeared, it was quickly covered up by a hand, although not quickly enough to hide the suspicious absence of a large quantity of teeth. I never questioned it, thinking such things to be normal. Before I had managed to retain him so in my young memory, however, a new set of teeth appeared there. Along with the now-perfect teeth came a smile that slowly became more frequent. The scars on his legs had healed, their stories told to me. Now another piece of him was patched up, and I learned another piece of the puzzle. By the time I was old enough to wonder about this particular mystery, I was also old enough to know not to ask him directly. The answer would be short, brutal, and back would be the shadow in his face. So I danced my way around the topic, and finally sketched a rough timeline. It had happened sometime after the fateful race across an open street when a sniper had found its mark, was all I found at first.
         My parents entertained guests often enough. I usually deemed these visits to be boring, vowing to myself that I would never sit around in a room talking about politics. While I was interested in my father’s past, I was most certainly not interested in the suited, balding men that sometimes left shiny business cards, sometimes personally written and autographed books, and sometimes only bad memories of barely controlled voices in the front hall, of slammed doors. I heard his nickname, Brada, thrown around during visits. I appeared out of my room only to greet his guests, smiling politely, holding my father’s hand. It was only when I was older, when the visits became few and far between, that I started recognizing the faces and names of the guests as those I had heard tossed around on the news and in the political forums I had begun to frequent. More often than not, mentioning the names of these men left my father irritable. They were, as he explained, the kind of men that liked to talk and appear on the television, but they did not do anything. I asked him rather boldly if he did anything, and he surprised me by laughing. ‘If there’s one thing you can learn from me,’ he said as he ruffled my hair, ‘it is that it is the ones behind the curtains that change the world, not the ones who are on the stage.’ It was one of his favorite sayings, one I heard many times as I grew up.

         ‘Who are all these people?’ I asked my brother and sister once, after my first time eavesdropping on one of father’s visits, and saw them exchange glances. ‘Why are they here? Who is  our father?” The last was the question that had been building in me for my entire childhood, the one I felt I had a right to know, for I was already a teenager. And so my siblings began to tell me. Several minutes into their narrative, whether by accident or in an attempt to bridge the chasm of secrecy between us, our father entered the room. An awkward silence fell, my sister’s eyes downcast, my brother red-faced.  Finally, father gave the slightest of nods, and my siblings reluctantly took up their threads. Father took over after a while, for it was ultimately his story.  I fit in the puzzle pieces I had meticulously collected over the years. And so I met my father for the first time.

         He had been in the army, as I had surmised from the infamous stories of his beard. From there a young man, newly wed, his wife pregnant with their first child, rose in rank. He hated the work, he hated the psychological strain, but he was the best and so he could not leave. He was in foreign countries more often than he was home, and when his daughter and son were in elementary school and saw him as the stranger in the household, he knew he had to finally come home to them. And so they grew together briefly. But although he had hated the army, this man was most certainly not an underdog. Fueled by fierce ideals and a vision of a better country, when the time came for war to break out, he sent his family to a foreign country and took up the post offered to him by his president, once again taking up the name of Brada.
         Three long years passed, in which he defended the principles he believed in so ardently. His colleagues would bow and bend under the strain of the invaders, but although a third daughter of his found herself in his life, he did not break. His colleagues would pose for pictures in their army fatigues and berets, but he would frown and turn his head. Lifelong friends were laid to rest, and yet he moved grimly on, even when a sniper’s bullet found its target. A nighttime foray into enemy territory, led by a supposed ally, proved the worse for him as the same ally turned him in for interrogation; his face only fully recovered all those years later.
         The war ended, but it was neither a victory nor a defeat. His role in it was seldom discussed in public, and never within his own family. For long years he was simply a shadow, moving, speaking, but not living. Slowly, however, as first his legs, then his face, and finally those shadowed eyes healed over, the ideals and principles and dreams returned.
         He never returned to the army, or to politics. I know that he still keeps a single row in his bookshelf of papers and pictures and books that he saved from that time, but he has since moved on. The papers gather dust as he gravitates to other forms of achievement, more subtle ways to defend his passions. He will never truly stop. I met my father that day, and I met his true nature. He cannot stop. He will simply keep going on, keep accepting, keep giving, until he has nothing left. It is his way.

          Is this what it is to be successful? Standing on the summit nobody else can overcome, alone, exhausted and not knowing anything but struggle? Should we be willing to sacrifice our own happiness, to live through experiences so harrowing most would fold under them in order to become heroes, role models to others? For in success we reach the summit, it is true, but the victory comes at a terrible cost. Only the strongest can survive. I throw one last glance at my father, alone at the top of his mountain, put my head down, and begin to climb towards him. I want to see how far I can go before I have to stop, before the sacrifice becomes greater than the reward. I want to see if I can surpass this great man and in turn become a hero to somebody else.

Word Count: 2069