Fragility
2022
description
1. It happened when I was 17. My girlfriend and I were dancing the whole night out, at daybreak we came to the cafe to call a taxi. We didn’t want to wait outside because we were tired. While we were waiting for a car a guy approached and started a dialogue we weren’t interested in.
We refused to talk to him but he didn’t like it. He sat down and started to suggest spending time with him, alcohol and drugs. Just then a car pulled up, we heard an escape call so we avoided answering.
We went to the exit. He wasn’t fond of it, grabbed my hand and demanded to go with him. I refused and told him to take a flying f——. He hit my face with his fist, got the eye, and I fell. My head hit the ground, I couldn’t get up. He was repeating that no one could talk to him like that, especially girls like me. He was kicking my ribs, face and legs. He blew off steam and left. Being too terrified my friend couldn’t call out for help.
2. Sunday night. My friend Sanya and I are leaving the coffee shop and start to cross the road at the corner of Kompross and Lenina Street. That’s literally the center of Perm but the streets are empty. “You there, what’s wrong with your walk?” I hear from behind the back. We turn around and see two guys walking right towards us. One of them repeats the question to my friend, “What’s wrong with your walk?” We don’t move a muscle, no idea what is happening.
Now I realize it was just a way to start a fight. But at the moment I haven't faced such a thing in a long time so I just forgot to react correctly (to run, it’s always to run). They are coming closer. The one with the question, a bully, can’t leave Sanya alone. Bully’s friend, a suck-up, is playing along. I realize that they are not really looking for a conversation. They want to fight, to swagger. I’m trying to calm everyone down and suggest diverging peacefully. There is a very weird, tense exchange of remarks. At some point, the bully grabs my friend’s cap and starts to leave saying that it now belongs to him. Naturally, Sanya tries to get it back. Big letters on the cap ironically say ‘genius’.
I blink. My friend’s nose is bleeding. The bully hit him with the elbow. I catch Sanya’s crazy-ass eyes. We didn’t expect that. A scuffle begins. The suck-up tries to take a swipe on me. But since he clearly is a dunce his actions can’t synchronize with his words so he drops the bottle of vodka (yes, he had a bottle of vodka). The bully rushed to me. I put my hands out and try to calm everyone down again. “That's it, we're leaving. We got it! We got everything.”
I don’t have time to blink again. Everything in the right eye turns white, my body turns 180 degrees. I touch my face carefully and realize that it’s now a mug. My fingers are touching a hot soft black eye. The suck-up doesn’t stop picking on and now is asking money for the broken bottle. The bully returns to my friend. Sanya manages to snatch the cap but it gets him hit to the ear, his head meets a wall. I blink with my unharmed eye. Sanya kneels, trembles and then, apparently, faints. I run to him and yell, “Sanya, wake up! We need to leave! Wake the f—— up!” The suck-up shouts, “Wtf are you waiting for? Get him up!” But I can’t, he’s too heavy.
Sanya then told me that he didn’t faint. He decided to go possum style and played dead. It actually worked because the bullies ran away. I guess they got scared that they had knocked him off. My friend got off with a split from the inside nose, an abrasion on the ear and a bump on the forehead. I got a bright black eye and facial bone fracture with displacement in two places. That's how we once went for a cup of coffee.
P.S. The treatment cost me a penny, so it was the most expensive Americano I've ever drunk.
3. I’ve found out that my husband has someone else and told him about it. That’s when he grabbed me by the throat for the first time. A month later it happened again, and then several more times until he started feeling ashamed. He didn’t hit me or beat me up. He took out resentment and despair. He knew that no word could hurt me as much as physical strength. He was bitter.
“I’m sorry you’ve found out.”
4. I was thirteen; my brother was four years older. We were arguing about something—maybe a toy, maybe a computer. We were shouting and bickering. He started dragging me by the hair, hit my head. He smashed the glass door with his hand. I remember him taking a knife and threatening to kill me. Curled up under a table I was crying. I remember calling my mom’s work but she didn’t believe me. Then he said that he was leaving for a gun. I closed myself from the inside, called the police. But you know what they say, “no body no crime.” It was me who got taken to the station for some reason.
I haven't spoken to him since; there is nothing to talk about anyway. I don't like my parents' apartment and I avoid any visits, especially since he still lives on their couch.
Back then I was scared that they would find out in school—we were this good family. Now I think I should have told someone.
5. In the autumn, my then four-year-old daughter became very ill—high fever, false croup; I had to urgently go to the hospital. I spent some time there and having made sure that the danger had passed I decided to refuse further medical treatment and go home to recover on my own. There is no secret that the bronchitis treatment is a long-lasting issue; there is a residual cough that continues to torment you for a long time. I had good doctors who consulted me, and I was calm and confident that I was doing everything right.
I was treating my daughter but unfortunately I got sick myself. My husband worked a lot and returned home late. He was worried about daughter’s cough but he didn’t want to figure it out believing that if the treatment was correct everything should stop at once. He didn’t trust my arguments and wasn’t satisfied with the doctor being a man.
One night he returned home in the morning, heard a child's cough, burst into the room where we were sleeping, turned on the light and started yelling at me and insulting me. All his emotional speech boiled down to the fact that I didn't care about my daughter and treated her badly, he basically said that I was bad. I was outraged by such accusations and the fact that he woke fevered me and our sick child up in the middle of the night bursting in and attacking like that!
Even now when I think about it I feel a wave of pure rage. I don’t know what amount of self-control it takes to transcend such an attitude and try to see what is behind it. I couldn’t then.
I was torn apart by the injustice that was happening to me, by the disrespect, by the anger at myself for allowing such a thing. I started shouting loudly at him, demanding him to leave, but he didn’t, he shut me up with a backhand blow to the face. I fell—my height is 158cm (5’18), weight is about 47kg (103lb), he is almost 180cm (5’9) tall and weighs about 90kg (198lb). Probably, this was the moment when I saw stars; it was very painful and humiliating especially knowing that my daughter saw all of this and was crying.
Then he calmed down. I went to the kitchen to put the frozen chicken against the eye, he went to spend the night at his father’s house in the neighborhood. In the morning he came back, looked at me and said, "I didn't hit you that hard; it's just that your skin is too delicate."
I left him in a week. Four years have passed. This year he wanted to talk about that and asked for forgiveness.
6. I was going through a hard time and was always happy to escape from reality with alcohol. That evening I was sitting alone in the bar and was already planning to go home when my friend came and offered to hang out. We started with shots of strong alcohol right away and I was able to pour them into myself so easily that my friend noticed, “It's like you're not planning to live on.”
At that moment, I really felt that way but I laughed it off. Then I remember drinking a shot and a realization that there was something else in it. I immediately asked a question to which the friend answered, “Yes but it's just a joke, I’ve also drunk it.” This friend was a close and reliable person for me so I didn’t attach any importance to this. Fifteen minutes later we went outside, and only then I found out that it was a tranquilizer pill that we both had drunk together with shots of strong alcohol.
After coming back to the bar I remember everything that happened next only from a few photos on my phone. I woke up not at home, undressed under a cold shower, my hands were cut, and all my clothes were covered in blood. I didn't understand anything and couldn't cling to reality. My friend was in the same condition. I was able to return home and go to bed. When I woke up I felt terrible. I started Googling the compatibility of these pills and alcohol and read some articles about increased side effects and “accidental death”.
I still don't know what happened to me that night, where I was and what I was doing. The friend reacted to my indignation and a bunch of questions with something about a really cool party. He said that he also didn't remember anything and that the stuff was “exactly it”.
After that night, I am wary not only of alcohol, but also of the people I surround myself with.
7. For a long time my mother was raising me alone. She was working two jobs as a cleaner; we lived in a room in my grandmother's apartment on sufferance. Now I understand that my mother wanted the best for me and hoped that I wouldn’t have the same fate.
Doing homework has always been an absolute torture—from perpetual drafts and rewrites to the screaming and tears falling on the notebook. I have always had problems with my handwriting, I wrote quickly and without mistakes but always illegible and crooked. Mom was hovering all the time and I couldn't concentrate and write normally, there always was supervision and control. If the writing was ugly or incorrect, mom would lose her temper and bite my hands. Apparently, in her opinion, it was supposed to make my handwriting more calligraphic. It happened at different intervals, and even now as I recall it my hands are shaking.
I still write like a fifth grader as if biting my hands fixated this handwriting. When I grew up I tried to find out from her why she did it. But in response I got a verified story that she did not bite my hands. She claims that I was writing with my left hand and the class teacher insisted on changing the hand. And, apparently, under the pressure my mother tried to teach me to write with my right hand and that's why my handwriting is so bad now. This made me way more bitter.
Not only can’t she admit her violence, she also thinks that I have forgotten it. But I remember everything. I remember it every time I fill out papers by hand and someone is looking—my hands start shaking, breathing becomes difficult. I don’t know if this is related but now my main occupation is writing comedy. And yes, I like to write more by hand and when no one sees.
8. My memories begin with me hiding and praying to God for all of this to be over soon. For me everything started when I was four years old, when my bed was opposite the hallway—mom burst into the house panicking. I didn't understand what was going on but I was scared. We lived on the ground floor, and that night all the windows were shuttered, the door was almost broken. I was very scared for everyone then—for myself, for my mother, especially for my grandparents, because they were very old.
This story repeated itself almost every year. Everything in his hands was smashed and broken, and thrown in mother. I was very afraid that he could kill her in a couple of seconds. One of the most terrible moments that I remember is how I come home and see the floor and the walls covered in blood completely, and my mother is cleaning it. On that day, he smashed the doors and started painting on the wall with bloody hands, after that all the walls, the floor and the bathroom were covered in blood. He broke everything that was bought by mom, every piece of it. I couldn't even help her a little. We were afraid to call the police because psychos are very good actors who when around the people play a believable goody-goody.
But one day it happened when I had a boyfriend at home. It started, the guy called the police while I was sitting and crying, drawing and praying for it to end. We waited for the police for about twenty minutes. I went outside and waited for them to come so that my mother wouldn't be killed. When the policeman came, he asked a few questions to which my father calmly replied with “everything is fine”. When my father left for a smoke my mother begged the policeman to take him to the police station otherwise he would just kill her. The policeman replied that he had no right to take my father out of the house since his answers were calm. Mom continued to persuade him and, thank God, the policeman helped us—he continued to ask questions that made my father mad. When the policeman saw father getting angry he took him out of the apartment. At that moment, my mother took the keys from my father so that he could not enter the house again.
A few days later the father returned ostensibly to pick up his belongings. Mom let him in; he just lay down on the couch, turned on the TV and pretended that everything was just like it was supposed to be. We couldn't just kick him out. He's huge, one blow and we're done.
The next day mom hid in my closet. I wasn’t home, and my father brought a woman with whom he wanted to sleep. This woman must have felt something and told him that she wouldn’t go to the bedroom but he continued to say that there was no one at home and everything was fine. Mom was listening to all this while sitting in the closet shaking with fear. Father decided to take the woman home and they left. But he forgot the keys and Mom quickly closed the door so he couldn't get home anymore. In a month we were able to sell the apartment and buy a new one in order to leave this place as soon as possible. We didn't care about the destination; the most important thing was not to see my father anymore. We took all his things and moved them to the parking lot where he usually went drinking with his friends.
This story is still not over. Father has found out where we live now. He has found out the apartment’s number, floor and even size. Now he sometimes comes and watches mom walking the dog. He even got a job on a bus that passes by our house, and every time he sees us he starts calling and calmly asking how we are doing. This person thinks that we offended him when we kicked him out of the house. Every time I recall these screams, the broken things I start to shake. I remember every moment in detail starting from the age of four. And this is only the tiniest part of the story.
9. I loved him immensely. He was already crazy. But I didn’t realize it. I didn’t know what it was and why it happened. I was shooting a movie about poets in Nizhny Novgorod. We haven't seen each other for a month, and he was also a poet. He was invited to the island where the Volga river and the Oka river meet (surely a power place) to read poetry at the festival. For me it was the climax of filming, for him it was a psychosis exacerbation.
Now I am sorry that to keep my mind wholesome I was thoroughly erasing what happened from my memory. Every detailed flashback hurt. He drowned me in the river (in the very spot where those f——— rivers meet), raped me, didn’t let go. But I didn't try to escape either. He was more about self-aggression, he cut himself, ate sand, starved, deprived himself of water, was delirious, tried to attack someone although he categorically didn’t know how to fight. For me it was much scarier than what he did to me.
His so-called friends (also poets) tricked me to give them his documents and took him by boat back to the city, and from there he was taken away by a mental hospital. I still didn't believe he was really crazy. His parents pulled him out of there, burned the documents with the diagnosis (so there wouldn’t be any bad energy), accused me of driving the boy crazy, and hid him in Thailand. I felt that my efforts were not met with a response and I tried very hard to forget everything. I started a new life.
Two years later, in Hamburg, when I was getting ready to get married, we met by chance on the Field of Mars. I was with friends but he and I climbed a tree. He was timid, but just the same as before. I felt that I wanted to take his hand and kiss him, and that I loved him.
And now I'm moving to St. Petersburg, and we're trying to start all over again. A year later he goes crazy again. He cuts his hands, kicks me on the head (although I can see from the floor that he himself is afraid of what he is doing, that he seems to be testing my boundaries). He kindles a bonfire from a guitar and a wooden headboard in the middle of our room. He runs away naked, disappears. I'm looking for him with the police and search and rescue squad. His dad says that this is happening because I don't want to start a family and make him jealous. When they find him, I can't stand it and thanks to a friend I go to Moscow. I'm editing my full-length debut film. I’m moving on.
Over the summer, he comes to his senses, I shave off my waist-long dreadlocks, do heroin and, after several dates, we start to rent a room in Moscow. I swear to myself that I will not tolerate it anymore and upon the next psychosis I will break off the relationship for good. But I still can't really believe he's sick. I come up with a million reasons why this can be happening to him, and, of course, I blame myself.
A miracle didn’t happen, only a remission lasted longer—after 3 years it hit again. This time he didn't touch me but he tortured himself a lot, tried to hang himself in the attic of our high-rise building, which I found out much later. He made it impossible for himself to swallow. I wasn’t 20 anymore; I was 28 and realized that this escape pattern is killing me. Being heart and soul to one another — psychosis — breaking up — recovery — coming back — pretending that nothing happened.
I decided that solving this would be my initiation. If I can figure it out then I would become a conscious adult. Having isolated myself and acquired a rear in the form of daily therapy, I stopped communicating with his parents, convinced him that it was a disease, led him by the hand through a rather long series of psychiatrists (it’s not so easy to find a good one). To be fair I don’t think it was only my firm intention that worked. It was also the fact that he himself started to believe that it was a disease, not a gift. Fortunately, mental health has become fashionable; he had many friends who were good examples that psychiatric care was not scary.
As a result, the diagnosis is schizoaffective disorder. A lot of pills, rare sessions with a therapist, a lot of side effects, but he’s mentally stable for four years now. I want to believe in a happy ending but even more I believe in the power of my love.
10. I was in prison under art.119.1 which is a death threat. I have lived with my cohabitant for almost eight years. He was the jealous type and beat me up because of it. When I ran away from him to my mom, he always came to us and made me choose, “You better come with me or I'll beat your mother up." I always chose my mom and had to go with him.
One day I caught him in bed with another woman and at that moment my vision stopped being blurred. I do not remember how I stabbed him.
I don’t understand why he tortured me so much for so many years. If he didn't need me, he could have left peacefully and nothing would have happened. He would have lived with another woman, and I would not have gone to prison.
11. I've been through a lot. I grew up with my grandmother; she brought me up in love and affection. I got married, had a daughter, and then my husband started cheating on me and throwing punches. I couldn't live like that so I left. When I met my second husband I was glad and happy that men like that still existed. I adopted his two children but they were like my own to me. Heaven didn’t last long.
It was when we had a child together that my husband's real character showed itself—first minor beatings, then the infidelity right in front of my eyes. There was nowhere to go, no relatives; all my friends had families of their own. Rent? There was no one to keep an eye for a toddler when I was gone. Dead end. There was no help. I went to the police, they said, "Well, he didn't kill you, right?" So it continued. I endured everything. At first it was painful and insulting, then the fear appeared, and then the hatred did.
I realize those are the bad qualities but at that moment I didn't experience anything else. I endured all of it until he broke my arm in three places, and only then I left. The child ended up in an orphanage.
The result—at one fine moment I couldn’t watch a man beating up his cohabitant, I stood up making a remark, "Why are you beating a woman." He started beating me up and after one blow there is no person anymore but 10 years have been lost, erased from my life.