Incest on the Fifth Floor

From the collection Tango Under the Same Moon

Though hypocrisy and subclinical schizophrenia never flustered him much as he was used to it since infancy, this affair saddened and troubled him to an unprecedented degree. It was a matter of severe and brutal inhumanity and immorality. It was an unruly dilemma of prodigious proportion. It was simply ferocious.

While on his second and last visit to his motherland since he had forsaken it many years earlier, he met a young, pretty, and impressionable girl. It was a pleasant evening at an acquaintance's house and the whole family was there. Also were there some friends of the family. Her elegance, beauty, femininity and grace caught his eye instantly. As he learned later, she was also attracted to him. He approached her and they talked. She spoke English flawlessly, so they conversed in English for privacy. She also spoke French fluently, played the piano, painted, and wrote well.

Their attraction to each other was intense and immediate. The more he learned about her, the more he felt a strong connection with her. He believed then, and was proven correct later, that the thoughts were mutual. He always had a soft spot for women who depicted graceful femininity. She unquestionably did. Her beautiful face and well-formed body, her long, black soft hair and big beautiful dark eyes are still before him now. That was how deeply he was touched.

She had introduced him to her charming but ordinary looking mother, her typically looking father with the large belly and the baldhead, and to her younger brother. They all seemed a delightful happy family. He was pleased to have met them all. They invited him to dinner one evening, as this is custom. He saw where she was residing. He saw her family's apartment on the fifth floor of a building in the middle of the crowded city. He also saw her bedroom and beautifully made bed, where he imagined her sleeping, dreaming, becoming.

They met several times after that. Each meeting deepened what had begun as attraction into something that felt, to him at least, like genuine connection — the kind that crosses language and culture and the ordinary distances between people. He was careful. He was respectful. He was, he believed, falling in love.

And then she told him.

She told him quietly, without drama, as though she had rehearsed the words so many times they had lost their weight. She told him what her father had been doing to her since she was a young woman. Not a child — she was careful to say that, as though it made a difference, as though the age of the victim changes the nature of the crime. She told him about the fifth floor. About the bedroom he had seen. About the beautifully made bed.

He sat with it. He could not speak. He could not move. The pleasant father with the large belly and the baldhead. The charming mother who had smiled at him over dinner. The younger brother who had shaken his hand.

What does a man do with knowledge like that? What does he do with the image of a family that presents one face to the world and keeps another face locked on the fifth floor? What does he do with his own feelings — the genuine tenderness he had felt, which now seemed to him both more important and more impossible than before?

He did not know. He has never fully known.

He left the country. He carried the story with him. He carries it still — the way one carries things that have no resolution, no lesson, no redemption. Just the weight of having known, and the question that never stops asking itself:

What does the human condition owe to the truth when the truth destroys everything it touches?

He does not have an answer. He is not sure there is one.

These stories are not comfortable. They were never meant to be.