Numbers

May 27, 2007

#s…

There are lives within lives that I will never know. An innumerable amount of living that would have been if I had walked one step to my right, had paused just one more moment before heading on into the endless, unknown future. There is an inconsistency that requires constant decision, evaluation, methods of pace – like a dance that could take you anywhere – could be any form of dance – and the partners are always changing. If I don’t know the steps, I pretend I do. If I don’t know the person I am dancing with, I will soon be as close to that stranger as though I’d been born to know them. Our bodies, unknowing and awkward at first, will ease with acquired taste, and the arms I am in will relax to a common embrace. Who would I be if I was not who I am now? What horrors and fantasies would have utterly engulfed the meaning and purpose of my life – and lives to come?

It was evening. The sun had just set and I was sitting on the front porch as I always do, washing my feet in a bucket of steaming water. The air was still and heavy, the shadows just beginning to form as a pregnant moon omitted a soft glow. As I scrubbed the rough, calloused heels of my feet and contemplated the quiet evening a certain agonized screaming in the road drowned out the silence. Two struggling figures stumbled up the hill toward my house. I could barely make out their frames, but one was waif-thin with a full tattered skirt and the other, the larger form of a male. As they reached my house, I stared dumbly as the woman screamed almost theatrically and the young man threw her a few steps ahead of him past my house. She stumbled and shrieked in rage as she fell to the cobblestone. He yelled above her and yanked her up with a mighty force. He was hoarsely shouting at her to the extent that he was almost sobbing; as though with each blow, he were actually injuring himself.

I recognized the woman immediately. Everyone in the community calls her doida (crazy) because she is mentally ill. In the past, I’ve witnessed her shed her blouse (with nothing beneath) and throw it happily to the wind. I have also unfortunately seen her crouching to do her business in my garden. She has a habit of wearing old broken high heels on this equally broken cobblestone road. Her mannerisms make it appear as though she’s on her way somewhere important and she wants to be sure she looks pretty. The lines on her bony face and dirty worn clothing reveal lifetimes of struggle, like the rings of an old tree that has been cut down. Sometimes she smiles shyly and gives a brief wave of the hand in response to my greetings; other times she does not respond. Many times I catch her in a heated conversation with herself and I often feel the pang of sorrow that there are no methods available to treat mental diseases in this country.

I also recognized the man. He is young – an alter boy at the church. He goes to school in bila (the city), is always immaculately dressed and often smiles with a confident, happy bounce in his step. I remember walking to a meeting with him once as I listened to him talk enthusiastically about his dreams and all he had in store for his life. I remember being impressed, as people here do not often talk about dreams as though they can become reality. Now this sweet boy was beating this woman in the street, dragging her up the hill as though she were an animal, she screaming for her life. Once I came to my senses, I stood up in confusion, and knocked over the tub, sending water everywhere. I yelled for him to stop and leave her alone, but he screamed that I didn’t know what was going on. For a second, she spotted me, began shrieking louder, and made an attempt to climb my stairs to escape, but he yanked her back to the ground. Searching, I spotted a group of neighbors in the house up the hill from me. They waved and smiled politely, completely unfazed by the violent struggle below. “This is not right!” I yelled up to them, anger in my voice. Immediately, the man at the house (probably in an effort to appease the naïve and morally optimistic white girl) changed his collected mood and obligingly shouted a few words for them to stop. Then he told me to, “just let them be.”

So I let them be, in my head thinking back to the polestra (awareness-raising info session) I had just attended about domestic violence. What could I do? I watched as the arguing pair turned onto a dirt path. More screaming, and then the boy sat down, his head in his hands. The woman came back for more, and started cursing him loudly. He threw a rock at her, and they vanished out of sight. Feeling upset about what I had just witnessed, and angry about all the problems here I cannot solve on my own, I fell in a heap into the muddy puddle of water on the cement. But life here does not allow for the dwelling upon things, so I went inside, cleaned up and made a visit to the house above to speak with them about what had happened. As I was there the man told me the two fighting are mother and son.

When I returned home in the dark, and said goodnight to my student who had walked with me, I saw a figure sitting in the road in front of my house. It was the boy and he was looking out into the sky like a child lost within an enormous universe. I imagined he was talking to God, or maybe just searching for reason among the stars. As I sat down in front of him on the ground in the middle of the street, he looked at me, his eyes gleaming with tears, and we talked in the lamplight as people passed along the road. I know instinctively that he is a good person with a tragic life. He talked about what happened – told me that his mother was sick, that it was just the two of them to take care of each other, and that she had been drinking and he had gotten angry. I firmly stated that under no circumstances was it right to hit a woman, especially not the one woman in the world who had given him life.

That day at church his students had preformed their profession of faith. I had been there and had seen the smile on his face, how proud he was of his pupils, how much he cared to set an example for them. I asked him what kind of an example it would have set to see him hitting his mother like that in the street. I told him how dealing with his anger that way could live on into the lives of his future wife, children. I told him that there is right and there is wrong and that he is lucky enough to have been born with a healthy mind to determine the difference. I told him he could use his pain to reach out to his students who no doubt suffer pain in their own family lives. And I told him about the dreams he had for his life; that I hadn’t forgotten – that he shouldn’t. After I told him all of these things, he hugged me, sobbing. I was caught in a dance I did not know, in arms that were unfamiliar. Had I not been on the porch washing my feet that evening, would I be holding this boy now? I let him cry onto my shoulder and as he did this the sound of his tears falling echoed through the darkness and traveled upward, searching for a place among the stars.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard once wrote this about numbers:

“There are maybe nine galaxies for each of us – 80 billion galaxies. Each galaxy harbors at least 100 billion suns. In our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are 400 billion suns – or 69 suns for each person alive. The Hubble shows, said an early report, that the stars are, ‘not 12 but 13 billion years old.’ Two galaxies, nine galaxies … 100 billion suns, 400 billion suns … 12 billion years, 13 billion years … These astronomers are nickel-and-diming us to death.”

When talking about numbers, Joseph Stalin also writes, “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic.” How can an individual count?

The average river requires a million years to move a grain of sand 100 miles. Debris lifts land an average of 4.7 feet per century. We are only about 300 generations from 10,000 years ago. Sixty million of us die every year. Statistically speaking, we don’t count. Yet, in those moments as I held the body of a weeping boy who has a lot to learn, that moment was my universe – my galaxies, suns, deaths, years, grains of sand, and generations of living. In that moment, in the life of that lost person, I as an individual, counted.

I could have lived any number of lives.