Chapter Twelve
Gabriele smashed a corpulent ant into her second composition when neither flicking it away with her fingertips nor blowing it off her paper was successful. She was writing a second story to put her son to sleep after finding the first composition ridiculous. From this action the insect was nothing but a brownish green blotch on her new work. "Thai Tiger," she rewrote after scratching out the earlier paragraph that had the blotch in it, "waved goodbye to his mother and father from the window of the plane. He was both sad and happy because he was leaving one thing he loved and going to another. The plane went into the clouds and came down in Sri Lanka. Tamil Tiger was waiting for him. Tamil Tiger's mother took Tamil Tiger and Thai Tiger to her home in downtown Colombo. What is Colombo like, asked Thai Tiger from the backseat of the car where he sat with Tamil Tiger. It is full of wars, said Tamil Tiger. What are wars, asked Thai Tiger. Let's change the subject, retorted Tamil Tiger."
Gabriele paused from her writing and remembered her time in a Moslem country. For three months, when she was almost 6, she was in Turkey. She remembered that day when her mother suddenly came to Kansas for her. It had been nearly a year since she had seen her and she felt a mixture of fear, surprise, and happiness at the thought of having the fragmented pieces of her life reassembled. She did not know if this interruption of her adaptation to her aunt, uncle, and cousins had some permanency. She was already speculating that there was no permanency- only being banged in the buttocks with bumper cars or being run over by tanks. She was only told that they would be going on a trip to the other side of the world. The potential of seeing something outside of Kansas made her very happy. Like any child, the discovery of flight was a marvel and she stared out of the window as much as she could. It was a subject of curiosity that the clouds she had always looked up to (a good many in the shape of the philosopher, Heraclitus) had really been nothing but footstools with wooly sheepskins on them all along. It was quite a surprise and shook her hypothesis that her mother was mistaken in saying that there wasn't a Santa Claus. She had formulated this hypothesis erroneously by the evidence of some irregular clouds that seemed as if they were Santa's frothy sugar castles.
In Istanbul she became reacquainted with her father again. Like in olden times when she was four, he began to take her on trips to the beach to pick up seashells or shop for groceries. Once they were shopping for some vegetables in a tight labyrinth of a crowded and dusty outdoor market when suddenly they heard the sound of that Moslem call to worship (a hybrid sound like of an instrument and a human voice) but the call was at the irregular time of 3:00 on a Friday afternoon. Pandemonium was in the streets, but everyone was going in the same direction so actually Istanbul was less helter-skelter than usual. Pushed with the herds, she and her father walked 5 blocks to an ornate mosque. She wanted to know what was "going on" so her father put her on his shoulders and told her that a special Turkish custom of a beheading was to begin shortly. "Beheading?" she asked. "Yes," he said with a wry and troubled smile. "To be without a head like the headless horseman although I suppose a less animated one." For a moment she was so pleased and excited that she would witness such a splendor until she saw a man with a bag over his face dragged up against his will onto the marble stairs leading to the temple and a third man with a huge scythe in his hands. A second later she witnessed the burly third man swing, with all his round, bulging, muscular might in one fail swoop and the head part from the shoulders which the second man placed in a basket. There was surprisingly little blood at first. Then the arteries disgorged their content while the body fidgeted a few times on the holy marble.
She suddenly knew that adults were monsters and that they ran amuck in the world inimical to human decency. In deep pain of one fragmented and grieving for this man and the human race, she nonetheless controlled her urge to cry. She assessed her situation. If indeed she were in a land of adult monsters, outwardly she had to acclimate to their mores and yet do the best she could, while growing up, to refrain from becoming a monster herself. If one couldn't withdraw from a situation, she felt more than thought, a girl must play the game. If she were to leak out her pain by blubbering, they would hate her and she would be perceived as foolish and weak. Crying would never help. It would only get her into trouble. She asked herself how best to achieve this ostensible aim and she told herself that she should be inquisitive. She calmly asked why the beheading had occurred, the reason for the timing of the occurrence, the exact nature of the crime, if beheadings were permitted in America, and the final resting place for a 2 part individual. The questions made her father, a USAF officer for NATO, and her mother, a USAF soldier's housewife, so happy. The next day as her mother was with curlers in her hair and her head in tact and under the dryer at the beauty parlor, the young mother pointed out her daughter and boasted about all the questions she had posed regarding the beheading the previous night. They boasted about her often; however, two more months passed and the clarity of the ephemeral nature of the reunion with her parents became clear. After her summer holiday was over and their honeymoon reunion with their child had ended, Gabriele was sent back all alone in a jet to New York City and then a second connecting flight that would lead her back to her aunt in Kansas.