mandarine

This is a story about misery, prejudice, injustice, humiliation and grudge. One I had completely forgotten about until my brother told it as a family joke at a family gathering some years ago. It is a symbol for all the psychological tortures that younger children endure from their elder sisters or brothers.

My brother was probably five years old. We were on vacation with our parents, the baby and cousins of sorts. There must have been a pool or a pond or a lake near the rented house, because the story is about my swimming goggles.

I know I had conspicuously left them on the kitchen table, but they were not there. I looked and searched, but they were nowhere to be found. It is unclear whether I was at all embarrassed by the missing item, but when I finally found them sitting atop the fridge, I was mad enough to fetch my brother straight away, drag him to the kitchen, show him the goggles and tell him that he should not have touched my stuff, and certainly not moved it. When he pretended he had nothing to do with the event, I got even angrier and showed him through logical reasoning that he was the only possible culprit: ‘Mommy would not have moved them without telling me; daddy is out for groceries; and none of the cousins is tall enough to reach the top of the fridge. I sure know it could not have been me, so it is you (quod erat demonstrandum)’. Legend has it that he denied softly, and that I went on: ‘I would not be that mad if you at least admitted it was you; or if you had told me where you had moved them; or if you had asked permission to touch them; but you did none of those things, and what is worse, you continue denying something obvious’. Maybe the passing years have swollen the legend - after all, as I had lost all memory of this tragic event, I have to take my brother’s word for it. This is how it goes: ‘So it means you are a filthy liar (as always), that nobody can trust you (as always), that you are not brave enough to take responsibility (as always) and that you are stupid enough (as always) not to understand that there is no room for doubt, so confession is your only option.’

Then, just when things were turning very sour, Mommy came into the room unaware, and said: ‘I see you have found your goggles - I meant to tell you I had put them on the fridge so I could clean the kitchen table’.

Now if such a thing happended to you as a responsible adult, you would wish you could shrink to the size of a mouse, crawl under a stone and hide there out of sheer shame and guilt. I did nothing like this. I did not apologize, or at least not enough for my brother to remember. I went on to previous business, leaving my brother feeling the misery, prejudice, injustice, humiliation and grudge.

When you consider that this is just an example among a series of similar episodes between me and my little brother, maybe you can imagine the shame and guilt that still haunt me today. Asking for forgiveness twenty-five years later is better than nothing, but it will never undo what my brother went through. I am a little relieved so see that it did not prevent him from becoming a brilliant individual with a PhD in medieval history from Oxford University, but I pray I will be able to teach my eldest son the evil of prejudice and the virtue of apology before he can scar the soul of his yet-to-be-born little brothers or sisters.

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