I was going over the notes that I had taken for this current book that I am writing, and I found a quote from a conversation with a lady. I shall spare the details of what the focused conversation was about but she said something really interesting, “I learned who my husband was when he turned his parents in.”
She was born in Albania, now in her early sixties and fortunate enough to have migrated to Australia during the 1990s. She divorced her husband once they both arrived in Australia. It was easier to remain married during the application process. They had lived through communism, a form of state socialism that many Westerners will claim is not real communism or socialism. She had to suffer it regardless. It was a collectivist ideology all the same that used the delusion of Utopia via force as it’s basis. As she put it, “the State was our parent, and it was harsh.”
Her body had been owned by the government, she had learned this from a young age. It was not that she had surrendered it, she had been made to accept it. Born into it, after all the State was the parent. When she married her husband, she also soon come to learn that her body did not belong to her on some nights. One evening, he wanted her, she had not desired his attention, so he beat her. Thereafter, she understood. It was, his right. In a society that bludgeoned equality into the minds of it’s subjects, it was widely known that some had more rights than others. Like her acceptance of the government owning her body, it had left her numb. She said, “empty of care or want, what can I do?”
Despite him, she loved her in-laws, ‘they were good people, honest.’ Good people. They however were criminals, the were the worse sort of people under the umbrella of communism, they were blackmarketers. Her In-Laws grew produce and made things which they then sold ‘illegally’. Her husband decided that it would be politically expedient for him, to tell the officials. His parents were arrested. It is unclear from her retelling whether this profited him in his relationship with the government, it certainly did not with her. Despite the beating, the other assaults, she now truly hated him.
“I hated him, I hated the government. I now saw, I saw. I was made blind before. I now saw.”
He had continued to take her when he wished to, but her mind stirred with hate. She told me that she would fantasise about other men as he thrust upon her, she spat anti-communist insults upwards at him on a few occasions. He would slap her, though it would him that cried. This made her laugh. He never dared to tell the officials about her, if he did, then he would have been alone.
The communist regime eventually fell. He changed his opinions about communism, like many others did, after. She hated him all the more for it. When she came to Australia, she looked forward to freedom, the open air markets, conversations that were not illegal, sleeping in a clean bed…alone. Over time she told me that she had noticed a growing cowardice among Australians that she had experienced under the communist regime, a deplorable weakness to bow to authority even when it was wrong.
I told her that the Western belief in itself was that it celebrated liberalism, liberty, in reality it sought dependency. Even obedience.
In writing up my conversation with her, I felt a little lost, how to articulate the spirit in her words and the passion she had for otherwise mundane things that many of us once took for granted, things that are now banned, illegal, prohibited, regulated or costly. Each generation grows to learn this, it’s almost an expected cycle in most societies, the elders moan to the youth, “in my day we could do this.”
The malicious creatures that ruled communist Albania were all human beings, just like we all are. They were not evil, not monsters. They were doing jobs because it paid them, they believed or they did not otherwise care so long as they had food and shelter. Some were likely cynical and self serving but many were true believers, obsessed with control, convinced that with enough ideological implementation, human beings could become robots or made into children. They believed that they are the caretakers, benevolent and god-like in their hubris to lead, force, manipulate and rule. They may profit from this, ‘it’s a perk sure’ and they may have more rights in some instances, or at the very least the satisfaction of being right, so long as threat of violence ensures.
The violence is distant, implied, it’s assumed. Like her husband knew, peoples bodies are to be owned, his wife had a duty to him. The people to the government, society. She yielded it, she did not want to, but she had no agency. This was understood. It was easier to turn her head, endure, suffer, the threat of violence always there otherwise.
“How he treated me, is how they see me and you, them,” she pointed to strangers as they walked by. We both understood, who she meant by they.
He never took her mind, her spirit. Her dissident heart remained, the yearning for liberty never died. Even when many of those around her remained willing, complicit and obedient. It’s assumed and implied that your body does not really belong to you, your labour is taxed, told what you may ingest, permission required or not granted, business and homes governed to the smallest details, currency growing meaningless, censored and owned. For the greater good of her marriage, she suffered. For the greater good of society, so must many others. The benefactors and those who know better, they are all that matter. It’s for them that we must endure, must be made to suffer, the greater good is in their best interests. The marriage, was in his best interest.
She was able to get a divorce and move to Australia.
In this story, there are no more Australia’s left. No more divorces. So now, she like many others must again turn her head. My question is this, do you turn yours or do you keep thrusting? Then again, over time I have come to learn. You most likely don’t care.
