Читать книгу The Fiddler Is a Good Woman - Geoff Berner - Страница 11

Belfast, 2013

WHAT I recognized about her right away was that she had been raped. In her life, she had been raped. I don’t know if everybody who’s been raped has this ability, but when I’ve talked it over with others who are living through the aftermath, the aftermath which is your whole life, it’s been something we felt we could notice. Obviously I don’t spot every single person and sometimes I’m wrong. So I never walk up and announce it to the person. I just wait and am not surprised if they tell me about it after a while.

You might doubt yourself when you think you see it, but deep down you know when you see somebody else who’s living through it. Call it rapedar. Ha. I know I shouldn’t laugh but you’ve caught me on a difficult day … should I go on? You seem a bit uncomfortable.

Right, so, my rapedar spotted her. ’Cause here’s how it is, like, when someone is doing that to you. Your mind is shrieking, “no, no, no,” and you’re looking for some kind of escape, and you realize that there is no escape. You are in a nightmare. And the man who is raping you, or the men who are raping you, as in my case, are laughing at your pathetic search for an escape, because you are seen as an amusement toy, and you are thinking, “Why doesn’t somebody help me? Why is there nobody here to help me?” But there is no one to help you. You have been selected to have this experience of complete and utter powerlessness, of men laughing in your face while you are powerless.

Perhaps if it happens when you’re a small child, then it’s a different matter. Perhaps then, the world of rape is the only world you’ve ever known. I don’t say that I speak for anyone except myself, but I suppose I must have been raised with some expectation of safety, or perhaps not safety but autonomy, because afterward, well, I began to see the world very differently than before. You begin to see the people around you very differently.

Because you’re looking around yourself, and you’re thinking, That person didn’t help me. That person didn’t help me. In particular, you see people in authority, people like teachers and headmasters and headmistresses and police and priests and nuns and parents and you think to yourself, She couldn’t protect me. He couldn’t (or wouldn’t) protect me, as you look at all these people who are in your world who are supposed to have your best interests in mind, to keep you safe, to do things for your own good and you think, What an unbelievable load of shite that is.

And you find yourself surprised, caught off guard, by how very, very angry you are indeed.

Because while the rape is happening, it’s like the world has been turned on its head. You’ve entered a new world of betrayal where people are getting real enjoyment out of doing you harm. You think, This can’t be happening. It’s like the world has been turned upside down.

But then you look around you, and you start to see the world, and you begin to think, no, the world didn’t just turn upside down. This is the world. The people who are supposedly there to protect you and others, they don’t, in reality, do that. Many of them are part of it, part of the people who think it’s funny when they can make others feel as if there’s nothing they can do but have harm done to them.

And so when I say that I spotted DD, when I connected with her that afternoon at the pub, that’s what I mean, what I saw. I saw the anger. My sort of anger. Not boiling beneath the surface, but right there in plain view. If you have it yourself, you can see it in others — the way she held herself, the way she held something back behind her smiling eyes. It’s the anger of knowing that the world is not simply imperfect, not simply needing a few nice alterations so it can be just grand, just peachy — the anger of knowing that the world is completely upside down.