Mother is calling us in to dinner.
It’s being served in the large dining room, we’ll be sitting on the Josef Frank chairs around the Swiss dining table.
Mother has got the cook to measure out exact portions of cod and perch with Iranian caviar, precisely as much as a seven-year-old and an eight-year-old need for their physical development according to the latest dietary research.
The housekeeper washes our hands, takes off our jackets, and leads Josefina in, she’s five, and her portion is smaller than it should be because little girls have to be kept thin, there’s no clearer sign of bad character than a couple of extra kilos.
If we squabble at the table, Mother hits us on the knuckles with a fork. We both have scabs on our knuckles, and so does Josefina, she gets hit if she so much as opens her mouth.
I, Leopold, get into more trouble than Henry, but I still want to do what Father wants, I want him to love me most, and sometimes I hit Henry to make him stop talking, to get him to follow Father’s example the same way I do.
But Mother hits us most of all.
On Father’s orders. And I can see that she enjoys hitting my brother, and she hits hard.
You shouldn’t talk while you’re eating. And if only pain can stop someone talking, then pain is what you have to use. That’s a perfectly rational conclusion, and in the end we believe it, we believe Mother, we believe in punishment as the path to proper behaviour, we believe in silence. But sometimes we can’t help ourselves, because after all we’re two little boys, and then she gets the housekeeper, sometimes with the gardener’s help, to lock us inside the empty storeroom in the cellar, and we get to spend the night in there. Father tells us to mock the servants, then lets them punish us, beat us, and lock us up.
We talk.
Regain control of ourselves. Grow bigger the more frightened we get. Often Josefina is with us, and I remember the stink of excrement. Sometimes she sits alone in the dark, empty, cold room, because it’s different for Josefina, it’s as if Mother thinks she’s inferior by nature and that her very existence is enough for her to deserve punishment.
We are given animals.
A grey rabbit, a brown guinea pig, a puppy.
Father encourages us to torment them even though we don’t want to. He hits us until we hit the animals.
Learn power, he says, learn to be ruthless. You’re the ones in charge.
Father travels to the Congo.
He brings home a large, live lizard that becomes his very own pet. He takes it for walks in the garden, on a leash, then sets it loose on us, and we run down into the cellar, to the storeroom, and he locks us in, and has the beast scratch at the door, scratching after us, hungry and starving, as if we are its prey, and I hug Henry, hugging away all his fear and anxiety, promising never to abandon him, promising to help him become like Father.
Sometimes we creep down into the cellar when Josefina’s there alone.
We stand outside the storeroom, listening to her cry the way we usually do when we’re locked up, when the lizard comes. We could open the door, but we don’t. We whisper cruel things to her through the door and she tells us not to, and that drives us mad. We chase after her when she’s been let out, hitting her, kicking her.
The contented look on Father’s face. Mother’s laughter.
We learn to believe Mother, we believe she’s right, because pain is always right, it comes from logic, or rationality, as Mother says. She uses that to justify everything, even though there are no logical reasons for her outbursts and material vanity.
We merge together. Try to be what he wants, she wants. Those we love. We don’t know any different.
Mathematics. Logical thinking.
All we have, Mother says, comes from mathematics, and that isn’t governed by emotion. What your father knows is how to count, and how to turn that into business into an empire. He was the most talented student of mathematics ever at a university in a faraway country.
Father is seldom at home.
In the garden, with a sated and happy lizard on its leash beside him, he encourages us to take risks. And when we don’t dare he drives us on, to do things like climbing the wall facing the Lidingö Sound, the one with the twenty-foot drop down to the rocks and the water, and he laughs at us, calls us cowards, and goads the lizard to chase us, and then Mother locks us in the cellar because she saw us climb the wall from the window.
You’re not to climb the wall. What would people say if you fell off and killed yourselves?
And Father laughs as the gardener, or the housekeeper, takes us off to the cellar.
To the darkness.
And we believe in both the mocking laughter and the justified anger, we believe in mathematics, in always acting rationally.
But what does that mean?
Sitting quietly beside Mother on a gilded sofa while she shows off what she’s got, what she’s acquired since she arrived here from the country where no one was allowed to have anything? Smiling when the photographer tells us to. Smirking at our little sister, who’s never learned how to smile, or even how to pretend to. Hitting her to show our strength, her weakness.
Does it mean hitting other children who think they’re better than us? Who know things we don’t?
You have to protect what you are.
At any cost.
Mother teaches us that.
Father teaches us that.
They teach us what it means to be human.
They teach Josefina.
Being human means being beaten by your seven- and eight-year-old brothers. Watching them get electric shocks if they refuse. And it means getting locked up in a dark room and accepting that this is right, because someone who knows best has decided that it’s right, and if you’re lucky you’ll learn to come to terms with your own fear, your own terror, you’ll learn to conquer it and grow fond of it, desire it, and without you even being aware of it you start to look forward to the moment when you get to set the rules, to your chance to be in charge.
It might mean being fourteen and lowering an eight-year-old pupil at the same school head-first into a crack in the ice when the teacher isn’t looking, with your brother’s help, even though he’s pleading for mercy on behalf of his friend.
It might mean tying another pupil from a poor family to a pommel horse in the storeroom of the school gymnasium.
It might mean smashing a bottle of champagne over the head of some stupid bitch from the suburbs in Café Opera the day your father laughed at your latest business proposal.
It might mean hitting a secretary in your New York office and drawing blood because she’s forgotten to book a restaurant for that evening.
But deep down you know all about your own shortcomings.
It might mean when your chain of sweetshops goes bankrupt and your father pays off your debts. Or when he laughs at your presentation at one of the management meetings of the family business, and sends you from the room in front of everyone else to do it again, like a naughty child who hasn’t understood his homework or is too stupid to be able to do it.
It might mean when someone sees your weaknesses, and points them out to you at a school reunion. It might mean when all the women you’ve ever met who have been worth loving turn their backs on you because you radiate the same smell as damaged, defective goods.
It might mean when you know you wouldn’t hold back from killing your own flesh and blood if that was what mathematics, rationality, demand. If that was what it took for you to save yourself.
You can’t run away from rationality like Josefina.
Or hold back and try to be nice, like Henry. Trying to pretend there’s another, gentler option.
There’s no such option.
All the beatings, all my failures and shortcomings have convinced me of that.
And what would be the point of trying to find a more lenient path?
You have to live in the present, in this suffering. Otherwise you’ll never be anything, and being anything at all has to be better than being nothing.
Archaeologists have found caves with paintings by those who came before us.
A different species’ pictures of their lives.
Dark, lonely places with pictures showing how they beat each other to death with sticks.
And beyond those places, those pictures, there are even darker places.
Where they eat their own children, in pictures made from paint mixed with blood.
And it was the strongest members of that species who slowly, slowly developed into human beings.