Beloved Father,

We always found it hard to talk. I kept on believing that the love I felt for you would somehow loosen my tongue, even if I kept it to myself.

I used to dream about sitting close to you, taking your hands in mine and leaning my head against your shoulder, telling you things, and then you would tell me things. But life seems to be treating us unfairly, increasing the distance between us, pulling us further apart than ever. What I dread most is the possibility of regret, sorrow over opportunities lost to silence or frittered away in denial, when we finally realize that it is too late, that it is no longer possible for the two of us to come together. May God give you a long life, Papa.

I know how much you love me. After all, I’m the son you waited so long to have. Writing this letter to you today is my way of declaring, in black and white, that I’ve hidden nothing – you really do know me very well, whatever you might say. There are no terrible secrets between us, no shocking past that I couldn’t bear to tell you about face to face, that I could only bring myself to confess in a letter. Whenever I need to convince myself about this, all I have to do is study those photographs where we are close together, as if I were a little piece of your body. Photos in which you are playing with me, or feeding me, or lifting me high overhead, or bending over my bed. Photos where you are laughing, and looking so proud as you show me off to your mother and father; or where you are carrying my satchel on the way to school. Or where we are eating ice cream and I’m crying because it has melted, and it’s running all the way down my arm to my elbow.

Ever since I found out about your illness – God willing you will come out of it safe and sound – I’ve had this recurring dream. My arms are around you, and either the illness is serious enough to put you in danger, or you are, in fact, dying. In the dream, I am twice my actual size and your body is very small, and naked, and curled up like a foetus or shrunken-looking like a large, featherless bird. And so, when I hold you in these dreams I can enfold you completely, bending over you as if I’m the protective barrier keeping some great peril from descending on you. I keep having this dream even though I know that your illness isn’t serious and that you’re improving steadily. These nightmares won’t leave me alone. If I’ve kept silent about them, it is only because I haven’t wanted to give you any more cause for worry than you already have. And also because I don’t want these nightmares of mine to lead to a conversation on a topic we have already been over so often. I mean, of course, my weak personality. And because, anyway, the more broken and disjointed our words get, the more we try to obscure or evade the truth, the harder and more complicated it is to hold on.

What gave me some courage to write, finally, was a letter written by a woman who was all on her own, lonely and deserted just like me. It’s a letter I stumbled across a long time ago in my little storage locker in the bar I worked in. Yes, back then I worked in a bar here – not a restaurant. Most likely she was one of the girls who worked there as a cleaner, or she was a hostess type sitting with the customers. Maybe she stuffed it into my locker to hide it. Probably she was being followed, for reasons she talks about in her letter. But there’s no address, no signature. The letter also says that she hid a document belonging to someone else. Whatever it was she hid could well have given rise to further accusations against her. It is too late for that now. So much the better for her.

The point…the point is, I reread that letter, though it’s been more than two years since I found it. I read it again and again, as if I knew that woman personally. Or as if I could actually see her in front of me, asking someone’s forgiveness but discovering she could not get it. And not just because her letter would never arrive. It’s about the need we all have for someone to listen to us, and then to decide they will pardon us no matter what it is we have done. I was a bit shaken when I reread this letter, and I felt some remorse about having forgotten it, there in my pocket, as if I had carelessly but deliberately neglected something that had been entrusted to me. I felt very badly even though I knew perfectly well that the chances of my ever getting that letter to where it was supposed to go were slim to the point of non-existence. As if this were some kind of betrayal, or abandonment. In short, what I did, without having any great hopes, was to go back to that bar and inquire whether anyone had ever asked to see me. No, they said. And the truth was that no one working there back then still worked there now.

This letter was written by some woman to her brother in prison. She confessed that she had concealed many things from him throughout her life, and she divulged what she had hidden. Now she was telling him everything, because she was alone in this world. This letter, which didn’t arrive where it was supposed to arrive, was like a voice that no one has ever heard – never, not since the very beginning. From the day this woman was born her voice was lost. As I read the letter I felt how close that woman’s fate seemed to mine, and what similar paths our lives had taken. I asked myself – as though I were asking the question along with her – what use is it to resist, if our fates are all sketched out for us from the instant our tiny bodies slide out from our mothers’ bellies? Thinking about this, it was as though I could go back to that moment, to be there watching as I came out into the world, a tiny lump of flesh in the midwife’s hands; to feel, seeing that flesh, a fierce pity along with the pain shooting through tiny lungs suddenly forced to inhale oxygen. As if now, the person I’ve become could actually bend over that nursing infant, longing to take him in my arms and to run away, holding him close.

My dear father, I don’t want to wallow in my sufferings, so I’m not going to give you a blow-by-blow account. What I do want to tell you right away is that somewhere inside I feel so fiercely proud of you. Of your love for us, and your determination to protect us in times of stress, and how ready you were, always, to make sacrifices for us and for what you believed in, then and still. I try always to imagine myself at your age, to put myself into the times you were living through then. But what paralyses my brain is the question of whether I could ever do what you have done in your life. Anyway, it’s an impossible exercise to imagine such things, totally impossible. No one can put himself in another’s place. What I mean is, in another person’s exact place. And in my case there is a crucial detail, which is that my body – which has made me who I am, in my deepest self – is not your body. My body, which you see as a betrayal. I cannot be a fighter because I am not committed in the way that you are – or I am not a true believer, devoutly pledged to the issues you’ve spent your life defending. What I’m trying to say is that it isn’t because I’m a girlie boy, as you call me. There are plenty like me who have fought and killed and been killed, and they’re probably more savage than the rest. No, it’s because combat and killing aren’t my style. And in any case, I couldn’t do any of it if I wanted to.

When my masculinity, my sex, slipped from my grasp, when I could see how the beloved body of the child I was began to abandon me, taking on the soft fragility and ambiguity that left it offensive, repugnant and unlovable in your eyes…these were the moments when I most needed (desperately needed) to see that you loved me. Or at least I needed to see that you were ready to give me some help to understand what was happening. You saw it as an illness, expecting me to recover fully, to come out of it free and clear with a little shove from the natural processes of growing up, or simply with a dose of time. An illness, but one without the sort of physical pain, for example, that would lead a dad to take his son to a doctor for treatment or to give him over-the-counter painkillers. My ‘illness’, you thought, was essentially an inadequacy or a deficiency, even if it was also a sign, in your eyes, that I was a depraved and sinful person. At the end of the day, my ‘illness’ was a punishment, or a retribution, and you searched high and low for what had caused it. A curse from heaven, a pathology, a punishment God brought down on you – on you – by visiting it on me?

Your pain caused me pain, a lot of pain. I wished I could just disappear. I begged God, on my knees, to cure me. If it was God who had erred when he’d made me like this, then who else could I go to in search of deliverance? I started to fear you. I wasn’t afraid of the weapons you carried nor the guns your men surrounded you with. What scared me was the sharp click of your key in the door; your nakedness when you came out of the bath; your loud laugh; your crude, hurtful jokes and horseplay; your sick, underhanded mistreatment of my mother; all the ways you dominated us, on the pretext that you were just defending the homeland from danger. Every time you came by the house, the blood pulsed in my heart with terror and joy. Every time you left us to go to war, I breathed an enormous sigh of relief and immediately began to cry because you might die in the very next battle you entered.

But I got older, and I got over being a curse or a sickness. Now, I am who I am. Because there are others who have loved me, people other than you. Once again, I began to feel good-looking, comfortable with myself, someone people liked and desired. I’ve seen God in His compassion, His tenderness, the largeness of His heart. The boy you shoved out of the house with your own hands, claiming it was the hashish – one single hash cigarette – what about him? You spat in his face and called him terrible things, blaming him for becoming a deviant. How old was I then? Deviance was your obsession, the spectre you began to see in everyone you encountered and in everything that went on around you. You, who called yourself ‘defender of the weak’, the outcast and untouchable, the exploited; you, who had fought against oppression and tyranny, as you always said over and over. How many deviants have you killed? How many betrayers have you murdered before they could betray anyone?

Father, one day I watched a documentary about a people who lived in a remote region of Russia, under the czar, somewhere on the border with Siberia. Their creator, their lord, was the raven-god whom they called Kutkh. What was bizarre about this was that they treated their god like one of them. No particular reverence, no exalted status, no worship to speak of. They blamed their god for certain things and they mocked the world this god had created for its deficiencies. They called him ‘stupid’, because the universe in which we live could be a more agreeable place, our existence easier, and life less harsh and less mean. But still, they did consider him their lord and their creator, in all likelihood because he was close to them, he resembled them, and they could criticize him knowing he would not come back at them with revenge or count it against them or punish them. When the czar’s knights – the Cossacks, mounted on their terrifying stallions – reached those people to bring them into the embrace of the Orthodox Church, they butchered and burned and destroyed, and they used the girls and women as oxen, since there were no such beasts in that region. They enslaved whoever was left and then they erected the Church of God under the exalted mercy and blessed benefaction of the czar.

Father, is it the czar who represents God’s will on earth? Or might it be the raven? Do the people ever get to choose?

Father, I did not leave because I was fleeing from you, or from the wars in our homeland. I didn’t leave in order to continue my studies or improve my future chances, or anything else like that. I fled from the czars, and I followed the raven. I loved the raven, and the raven was all that was left to me. No, I am not an angel. But nor am I a devil. I might be closer to the second, I suppose, if we were to explain what happened to me as some kind of retribution.

As it happened, not long after I met my beloved and began living with him, the symptoms began showing on him. He was no longer able to work. The owner of the fashion boutique where he had a job threw him out. We moved from our small flat to a single room. Then I moved from working in a sandwich shop where I made almost nothing, to a bar in a Jewish neighbourhood where a lot of gays lived. I didn’t feel any hesitancy about beginning to sell some of my evening hours to those who wanted a fly-by-night relationship. We needed the money badly. I didn’t feel any shame about working as a prostitute. But the treatment we were paying for didn’t yield results. My companion – my love – withered away in my hands, a little closer to death with every day that passed. All the care and attention I’d lavished on him weren’t any use at all.

When he refused to be moved to the hospital, I had to wash him, to feed him, to find ways to relieve the pain in the pus-filled sores all over his skin that by then was practically just a membrane over his bones. I was like a devout nun bent prayerfully over his many wounds, every evening and every morning. I held him in my arms as though he were a child, and very carefully and softly I rubbed rosewater into his wasting body. I changed his dressings. Even without any adhesive, the new squares of gauze stuck to his skin. I changed the sheets and washed them. I ground and pulped whatever I could in the blender so that I could feed him before going down to dry the sheets in the communal laundry and then making the rounds to buy the supplies we needed. Until he asked me to stop. ‘Leave me alone,’ he said. ‘I’m asking you not to touch me, from now on.’ He began pushing my hands away, and he would no longer eat anything at all.

Before long, when I finished work I avoided going up to our room. I would sit on the park bench in the street long enough to fall asleep. One very early morning, at sunrise, a policeman woke me up. He was very kind. ‘What’s going on, my son?’ My son, from a city policeman! I started crying as I got up and walked away.

I left him to die alone. That is a fact no matter how much I try to disguise it by using other words. No matter how often I say that I was only complying with his request, indeed his orders; no matter how forcefully I insist that it was his right to refuse to be seen in that state, repulsive and disgusting; still, I left him to die on his own. What I told myself was: when death comes, he won’t need anyone there. He will be so weak that he will simply flicker out like a lightbulb. He will not need me when he is dead. He will not need anyone. He has been dying for a long time. And I must forget him, because otherwise I will die along with him.

I got used to the street. The touch of other bodies was a solace I had been needing and searching for. Bodies alive with health and vigour, skin that did not ooze or know pain, unless it was the pain of pleasure.

My strong attachment to lepers and cripples – by which I mean all those people who suffer the illnesses of unwanted solitude and loneliness – turned into a love, a passion and a way of life that nourished me. There are so many of them out there: people whom life has cast mercilessly out to the margins where no one can see them, into the wastelands of isolation, walled off by virtue of their invisibility. These people see no one and no one sees them. Any attempt to infiltrate the world beyond that wall ends in catastrophic, violent repulsion, like the meeting of two substances whose magnetic charges repel each other. Two worlds, completely cut off from each other, two languages whose codes are mutually undecipherable, unreadable in whichever direction you try to read them.

We criss-crossed the streets of the city, sometimes stealing, more often begging, and though it’s easy to forget now, laughing and amusing ourselves too. Late in the evenings, I went with them to wherever it was they drank themselves to sleep: on the street corners, under bridges or in homeless shelters when the cold was at its worst. In one of those centres they examined us, and it turned out that I hadn’t been infected. I was very happy about that.

Among the people I got to know was a guy who showed up from time to time to preach to us. But he wasn’t dull or irritating as priests usually are. He laughed and joked with us. He didn’t hold forth with grandiose words about fires or Hell or things like that. He called himself an evangelist, a Bible-person; that is, he wasn’t part of a church. He read the scriptures and learned what to do from the life of Jesus of Nazareth. We didn’t throw him out, not only because he told such entertaining stories, but also because he had connections to various organizations which meant he could bring us a few of the things we needed. Then one day he took me and a handful of the younger lads outside the city to a very nice-looking centre for immigrants. It was like a small hotel. That was where a doctor told me that one of my eyes was going completely blind and that we must take immediate action to treat the other one so that I wouldn’t lose both. He said it wasn’t anything I had done. It was bacteria spread by a particular species of mosquito that laid its eggs in human eyes. I was very upset and sad, but what could I do? Sad…and angry. Then I began focusing on my hopes to save my one good eye, and did everything the doctor instructed in his weekly visits.

‘Why?’ I asked the evangelist in one of our evening gatherings where we listened to him telling the stories of the Messiah. ‘Why did people – why did all the people – choose Barabbas when Pontius Pilate asked them whom he should free on Passover, Jesus of Nazareth or that thief, that highwayman?’ His response was so amusing that we laughed out loud. ‘Because the people are not always right.’ He was cheating, I told him, because the question really was: ‘Why did the people vote against Jesus? Why was it in their interest to do that? What was their motive?’ Someone else said, ‘Jesus already knew what was happening, and it was his decision to go to the cross himself.’ ‘But why?’ asked someone else. The first guy said, ‘That’s just the way it was.’ The evangelist chimed in: ‘To sacrifice himself for us, to die for our sakes.’ But we protested. ‘Then how come we’re still dying horrible, painful deaths, even though none of us has sinned?’ We went back to laughing and our usual loud bantering as he thought for a bit. And then he said, ‘It’s a parable. The Scriptures are all about parables and symbols. Do any of you know why the Messiah walked on water?’ ‘No,’ we said. ‘No, we don’t know.’ ‘So that the rest of us would attempt the impossible,’ he replied.

This idea of walking on the water appealed to me. I looked at the people around me. They had all been rescued, pulled out of the seawater. They had lost their friends and family members to sinking boats. Maybe they should have tried walking on water. They didn’t, though, and this must have been due to a lack of faith or a shortcoming in the way they’d been raised. If we were really believers, we would have walked – without any boats, without the dangers and costs of those boats. I would have put on a pair of comfortable, roomy shoes and walked on the water all the way to Europe. Maybe even further. Hahaha! Or I would have tried to cross on a skateboard, since that’s a bit faster than walking. Maybe I would have stopped to have a pleasant picnic on the water – on the blue surface of the sea – followed by a nap. That would have renewed my strength to go on skating across.

And then there was that little strip of cloth covering the crucified man’s lower body – why did it never fall off? I asked him this question just for a bit of a laugh. I knew that, back then, when a person was crucified he was left completely naked, to humiliate him. So I said, ‘They always crucified people stark naked, since the point was to shame them by uncovering their private parts. So why cover him?’ It’s all very well for paintings and icons and statues in churches to respect the feelings of worshippers and believers. After all, a believer is modest and bashful by nature, and wants to focus on what he’s at church for. But these days, they strip us naked for the most trivial procedures. Yallah, take off your clothes! Yallah, everything – take it off! Underpants, too? Yes! As if a person’s penis or belly button will reveal secrets if they search it. Anyway, no one’s embarrassed now when everything’s on show. They’re not embarrassed and neither are we.

The evangelist fell back on his parables and his symbols, caught out by the question and unsure if it was asked in seriousness or jest. It all ended with us throwing him out of our gathering, because he couldn’t get into the spirit of our teasing. After that evening, I widened my circle of acquaintances. I began to enjoy hearing languages I didn’t know. When one of the other immigrants spoke to me in a foreign language I just nodded and smiled, not understanding a word.

For some reason, many of them spoke to me often and for long periods of time. Probably because they knew I didn’t understand their languages. They talked to me without actually looking at me. Anyone who wanted to ensure I was taking in what they said would look straight at me and speak in English. Maybe they took me for a madman, or just slightly batty, because of my one-eyed gaze. Maybe that’s why, at night, they would start sobbing in my presence, and why they walked about stark naked in front of me, coming from their bath, without showing any sign of embarrassment.

Then suddenly one morning, when we went out for our required exercise, we found the field around our centre choked with small tents of all colours, like wildflowers that had sprouted overnight amid the grass. Then came the buses packed with people – women and children. The buses disgorged everyone in an area fenced off with barbed wire. At the perimeter there were waves of police patrolling, addressing people through microphones and from behind plastic shields. They were tossing water bottles at them, and bundles of clothes. At one side of the field, TV vans were lined up. I felt dizzy. ‘It’s spoiled now,’ I told myself, and I left.

I’m writing all of this, Father, to tell you that, like the others, I vote for Barabbas, the conscience of the people. And that now, finally, I acknowledge the czar’s power. I am homeless these days, just a vagrant with nowhere to go, who is sick and partly blind. I have no money, I have nowhere to sleep. I’m worn out. I want to come home.

I still have my identity papers. If you agree to it, send me the money for a ticket, or send me a telegram c/o the post office at the airport, where I’ll post this letter. That’s where I’ll be, waiting for your answer.

I hope you will answer quickly. Salaam.