The place where I was supposed to use my energy wasn’t a rocket construction site, but a construction site where a five-story building was being erected. Every morning, at exactly seven o’clock, I had to be there. There was always work available for an unskilled, young, and eager worker.
When you’re sixteen, you’re as strong as a devil, and nothing is too hard for your arms. I wasn’t a massive guy with broad shoulders, but I had strength, and my muscles were steeled from boxing. I felt like I had something to prove, and I thought everyone there was working tirelessly.
Later, too late, I realized that at least half of the workers there were just going through the motions. They weren’t working tirelessly; they were just pretending to work.
So, for those people, a fool like me was always welcome.
“Boy, grab the wheelbarrow and quickly take two bags of cement to the fifth floor! Move it!”
“Boy, that trench needs to be another forty centimeters deeper! Get to work!”
“Hey, kid, bring another two hundred bricks to the second floor! Quick!”
“But, what the heck, didn’t I tell you the tiles have to be blue? Take these back. Bring me the blue ones!”
I haven’t traveled much in my life, but I suspect that across all the meridians of the globe, fools work the same way: foolishly. At that pace, it didn’t take long for me to ruin my back. My father got me a belt to wear under my clothes, tight around my waist.
Along with the belt and back pain, I also came to my senses and started to open my eyes. First my eyes, then my mouth.
“Boy, grab the wheelbarrow and…”
“I don’t have time!”
“Hey, don’t you understand we need…”
“The boss gave me work here, not there. Find someone else.”
“Damn it! Are you trying to act crazy with me? Watch out, I might come down there!”
“Go ahead, come down!”
In the end, they left me alone. The boss quickly discovered I had a talent: I could dig trenches like no one else. So that became my qualification.
I liked it. The ground, hard as stone, became obedient under my razor-sharp spade. I dug trenches from about seven in the morning until around noon, then had a half-hour break, and then I dug trenches again until late in the afternoon.
For ten or eleven months, I dug trenches; it became my second nature. In the evening, I chewed my food and thought about trenches. At night, I dreamed of digging trenches. In the morning, I could hardly wait to get to the site and start digging trenches.
I no longer read any books, didn’t go out, didn’t turn on the TV. I had become a beast that ate, slept, crapped, and dug trenches. I suppose there are many like that in this world.
After they left me alone, those simple people on the construction site started to watch what I was doing, and eventually, they became friendlier with me. I was one of them. I kept quiet, didn’t let anyone intimidate me, but didn’t bother anyone either. We were beasts, both them and me. Beasts are gregarious animals; they like to live in herds, shoulder to shoulder. Gradually, what was natural happened: they invited me for a beer.
I went. Why not? A construction site isn’t a very academic place. What is more logical, after a tough day of work, than to go with the herd for a beer?
Or two.
You sit at the table, sip beer alongside the other beasts, maybe whistle at a girl, listen to a joke. Real life! It’s true, the devil works in small steps. First, he grabbed me around the neck and whispered in my ear that a beer has never killed anyone. I drank it, came home, went straight to my room. My secret was safe. Or so I told myself.
And I kept telling myself that until the day I came home and, for the first time in my life, I was dead drunk. I don’t clearly remember how I had the strength to get to the yard and the house, but I still remember my mother’s frightened eyes. That I cannot forget.
My father didn’t care. He looked at me curiously, like you’d look at a strange insect, then grinned and said to my mother:
“Bring that bottle of wine from the cupboard, woman! Why are you crying like a fool? Don’t you see our son has become a man?”
My heart swelled: my father had said I was a man. I was only sixteen and a half, but I was already a man. And, like the man I was, I drank a few glasses of strong red wine with my father, then my knees went weak, and my eyes closed completely.
The next day, I wasn’t able to go to work. I felt so bad and vomited so hard that—with my head in the toilet—I solemnly promised my mother I would never drink again, and I kept that promise.
For about a week.
After a couple of months, seeing that I wasn’t bringing any money home, my father got angry. He had a little talk with the site foreman, and from that day on, my salary went where it was supposed to: straight into my mother’s purse.
That didn’t curb my desire for drink at all. When you work on a construction site, there’s always a bottle somewhere, somehow, passing from hand to hand.
The months passed. On the day I turned seventeen, I got so drunk that I cursed my boss. The consequence wasn’t long in coming.
“You drink too much, even for a trench digger,” he told me the next day, handing me my final check. “I’m sorry, Tiberiu!”
But in every bad situation, there’s a silver lining: my father cursed, then pulled some strings, paid what needed to be paid where it needed to be paid, and I was readmitted to school. My break had lasted only a year. The construction site became a simple memory, and I became a simple high school student again. An alcoholic one.
With great difficulty, I managed to finish high school. Those were two years I don’t like to remember. I piss on them.
Now I was dependent on my father again. I had to endure his whims, his caprices, the daily misery. Lately, I even had to drink with him. One day, he got so drunk that he almost beat my mother to death. That was the day I threw him to the ground.
“You broke my back, you bastard!”
He lay on an onion patch in the garden, cursing me, but no longer had the courage to get up. I answered with hatred:
“If you ever lay a hand on mom again, I’ll kill you! You hear me? I’ll kill you!”
The day I passed my high school final exam with the lowest possible passing grade, the principal was astonished. My teachers were astonished. And my classmates. How the heck had I managed? It was a mystery. Everyone expected me to fail the exam. Even I was astonished.
Things became clear a little later, when my father complained to my mother through the door:
“This jackass touched my cognac bottle again! Look at the mark!” he showed her. “What do you think? I fixed it so he’d pass his finals, and the jackass raids my cognac.”
That cognac business infuriated him terribly. For the first time in our family’s history, my father had to hide his drink. But where had such a thing ever been heard of?
“Man, you drink even more than I do!” he exclaimed, bewildered. Then he looked reproachfully at my mother. “What do you think, woman? See? This is your child!”
I thought things would stay that way. I was wrong. Three days later, my father announced to me without any right of appeal:
“Tiberiu, you’ve finished school. You’re no longer a child; you’re a man. A man’s duty is to defend his country!”
“What?”
“No ‘what.’ You will join the army, my son! You must serve the homeland! The country needs you.“
NEXT
Chapter 37. I Am Officially Insane
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