Читать книгу Escaping the Cult: One cult, two stories of survival - Kristina Jones - Страница 22

I’ve never been afraid of flying. When you are raised believing you will die in a glorious battle with the forces of Satan, a bumpy landing isn’t much to be scared of. But I still squeezed the arm-rests as we touched down at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. My father gave me a reassuring smile as we taxied across the tarmac.

‘It’ll be all right, Natacha.’

I wasn’t so sure.

Paris looked like a catacomb from the air – a dark labyrinth filled with unknown dangers.

I should have been dead already. According to Grandpa, God felt we had failed to adequately serve him or demonstrate the necessary faith. But now Grandpa was dead and Mama Maria had taken over the leadership. Through God’s mercy she told us the Apocalypse was rescheduled for 1996.

But here we were, heading straight into the belly of the Beast.

‘Bonjour.’

My father handed our passports to the uniformed man behind the counter. I gripped my mother’s hand and stared down at the floor.

‘Mademoiselle?’ I knew he was addressing me, but I didn’t look up.

‘Mademoiselle?’ This time he said it with more force.

I raised my head and our gaze met. I tried not to let my fear show. As I stared into a pair of blue eyes the images of Heaven’s Girl flashed through my mind. Would I soon die staring into eyes such as these?

‘Merci beaucoup.’

He waved us through. My heart was pounding and I felt light headed.

A childish tittering roused me from my daze. My brothers were helping Dad collect our luggage. Our battered suitcases looked ready to spew their contents over the luggage carousel.

I turned my head towards the giggling. A girl of about my age was whispering into her mother’s ear and pointing.

I shifted uncomfortably. ‘Mommy, why is everyone staring at us?’ I asked.

‘Oh, Natacha, darling. Everyone is not staring at us.’ She looked around. ‘And if they were, it is because they are system people and they can see we are God’s people. It is God’s image shining in you that makes them stare so.’

‘Do they want to hurt us?’

‘No, my darling,’ she continued, beginning to hit her stride. ‘It is just that they have never seen the beauty of God’s love made manifest in people such as us. And that is why we are here, remember – to share God’s love with these lost souls before it is too late.’

I suddenly became very aware of my surroundings. Everything was shiny, clean, properly built and maintained. The people were neatly groomed in expensive-looking clothes. Several of them were fat. Many of them smoked. Others looked bored, as if waiting for luggage at a gleaming airport in the Antichrist’s stronghold was perfectly safe. Didn’t they even know what danger they were in?

By contrast, we looked like refugees from a different planet. We were underweight, underdressed and under the impression that we were the normal ones – the ones, amidst all this material system wealth, who really knew what was going on.

Dad told us an uncle named Samuel was coming to pick us up. I was relieved to know we weren’t expected to take a system bus. Samuel was waiting for us in the main concourse. He was tall and strongly built, with dark curly hair and deep blue eyes. He greeted us with a warm smile and hugged my parents vigorously. ‘Bonjour, bonjour, welcome to Paris.’

He and my father walked ahead, jabbering at one another in a language I didn’t understand. Since moving to Thailand, American English had become my parents’ chosen spoken language because that was the official language spoken in The Family. Mom had taught us a smattering of French vocabulary when we were alone with her, but English was my native tongue.

Samuel held open a huge metal-framed glass door and gestured us through it. I held back for a moment, not trusting him and wondering if it was a trap.

‘Come on, ma chérie, hurry up,’ Mom urged me on with a smile.

It was absolutely freezing. The first thing to hit me was the wind. An icy blast bit into my face, causing my eyes to screw up and water.

I think I fully expected outside to resemble a scene of nuclear devastation – flattened buildings, the stench of death, the hum of marching boots, voices of women screaming and children crying. Instead, when I managed to open my eyes I saw rows and rows of cars. Not like the battered cars in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, but gleaming, shiny cars in so many different shapes I couldn’t count. My father and Samuel were already pushing our trolley across some striped lines in the road, towards a field of hundreds more cars. I quickened my pace, desperate to get out of the wind.

Samuel walked in the direction of a large silver car with square lamps at the front. I heard Matt mumble, ‘Oh wow, please let it be that one.’

Instead Samuel opened the door of the battered black Renault estate next to it. Matt looked crestfallen. Even I felt a bit cheated too, wondering how we’d all fit in. My father rode up front. Me, Mom – who carried baby Andy in her arms – and Aimée were in the back seat with Matt and Marc. Vincent and Guy squeezed into the boot space with our luggage. Driving through Paris was horrible. I was still tense and frightened, wondering if we might get stopped at a checkpoint or if a bomb might fall, but from what I could see it didn’t look like any bombs had fallen. Everything was still standing, people walked along the pathways, the roads were wide and well kept. It didn’t look there was a war going on at all.

To me Paris looked unnaturally clean. At the very least I had expected to see people being murdered in the streets, babies thrown from prams, drunken violence and drug use – all the depravities of the ‘system’ I had heard so much about but experienced so little of.

I was really confused but I thought it best not to admit it. I didn’t trust this Uncle Samuel and thought he might be a spy.

After an hour or so we left the city streets behind, the lush French countryside beckoning us on. I began to relax as my mother sang a hymn to pass the journey.

‘Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found, was blind, but now I see.’

We travelled east, to what Samuel told us was the Champagne region. The landscape in Champagne was like green corduroy, stitched from the grapes that Samuel explained made the region world famous. I don’t think an adult had ever taken the time to explain a journey to us before. Usually when we went witnessing no one even bothered to tell us the name of the city, but Samuel pointed out landmarks and buildings. I was beginning to think he might be OK after all.

My brothers and I made a game of staring down the rows of grapes as we flashed by. Each row offered a different view from the next. It was as if each one was a single frame of film and we were watching some strange movie. It made me dizzy and giggly and happy.

‘Here we are, everyone!’ Samuel declared as we drove into a little town up a steep winding hill. I couldn’t quite believe it. It was like a fairytale, with little timber-framed cottages clinging to the side of the hills. When we pulled up outside our new home my eyes nearly popped out of my head.

The house was the most romantic thing I had ever seen, with rustic beams and low ceilings. It even had a log fire, which Samuel lit for us. We all immediately huddled around it, shivering. Our clothes were completely inadequate for the French climate.

Samuel took my mom and me into the kitchen to give us a tour. He opened the cupboards, which to her delight were full of pans, plates and bowls. He’d even been thoughtful enough to buy a box of groceries – bread, milk, biscuits, pasta and vegetables – ahead of our arrival. I could have kissed him.

Before we left Indonesia the senior Shepherd had come to see us and given my father enough money to last three months, telling my father that was the maximum he’d been authorised to give us. Very quickly we realised it wasn’t going to buy much at all. Even if we were careful it would probably only stretch to a few weeks. My father decided the best way to make some money fast was either by ‘parking’ – which meant standing in supermarket car parks and trying to sell literature – or by performing music. I found parking excruciatingly embarrassing; playing music made much more sense to me because performing was what we did best.

We walked to the edge of town, where Samuel had told my father there was a large supermarket. It had a huge red neon sign saying Carrefour, a word I had never seen before. We took a spot by the exit, my dad started to strum the guitar and we sang our hearts out.

A man pushed his trolley outside, packed high with crates of beer. He walked past us, sneering: ‘Crazies.’

He was the first of many.

One elderly woman stopped and stared at my mother, barely able or willing to hide her distaste. ‘Bloody gypsies,’ she hissed at us, before spinning on her heel and striding across the car park.

A few people took pity on us – mostly the poorer agricultural workers. Perhaps knowing poverty makes one look more kindly upon those who suffer from it.

The cold was making the little ones ill. Vincent developed a horrible rasping cough and baby Andy couldn’t stop crying. My father promised my mother he would fix it somehow. Later he and I walked through the town as he stopped passers-by asking if they knew of any places offering free clothing or other charity items. Most people walked past us or shook their heads blankly. A man in a thick woollen coat stopped. As he talked to my dad all I could think about was how warm it would feel to be wrapped in that coat. He gave my dad a lifeline. ‘There’s a donated clothing centre run by the Catholics. It’s mostly for homeless folks, but I reckon they’ll let you go there. What are you? Some kind of missionaries?’

‘Yes, we are,’ said my father proudly. ‘We are here to warn people of the last days of the world before the second coming of Christ.’

‘Maybe you should think twice about telling them that!’ joked the man as he wrote the address down on a piece of paper and gave it to my dad.

‘Daddy.’ I tugged at his arm. ‘Catholics have lost their way to heaven. We can’t go to that place.’

He gave a sad little shrug. ‘I think … we need to take whatever we are offered. You children need to stay warm. That is the most important thing for me right now. Jesus will understand.’

The next day we found the place, a large hall packed with rows of musty-smelling second-hand clothing. Women in headscarves with children as scruffy as us pulled at the racks, barging each other out of the way to fill up their baskets with stuff.

My mother had gone pale. And that’s when I caught a look on her face. Not regret, but perhaps the acknowledgement that her life might have been so very different.

My father and the boys had already started piling into a rack of woollen men’s sweaters. I followed their lead and started grasping at a rail of women’s clothes. I pulled out a cardigan. It was so soft and warm it felt like touching a hug.

‘Well, Mom, what do you think?’ I asked in a tone that sought approval.

She picked it up with her fingers, examining it for holes, then turned it inside out to read the label. ‘Cashmere,’ she enthused. ‘Not bad work, Natacha.’ And with that, off she went, elbowing rivals aside with the best of them as she fought to find the best clothes for her family.

After that our life became completely dependent on charity. Every day my father would take either Matt or Marc, who were 15 and 14 respectively, and comb the nearby towns in search of organisations that might be able to help us with either food or money.

They went everywhere on foot, even in driving rain or heavy snow.

One cold evening Dad arrived home particularly late and, as was so often the case, empty-handed. Marc had been with him. When the pair of them had left in the morning it was already raining, but by late afternoon a thick icy fog had settled in. Marc had only one pair of flimsy leather shoes with a hole in the sole.

As he stumbled through the door I rushed over to help take off his oversized tweed coat. ‘My feet, they are sooooo cold.’

He couldn’t wiggle his toes and I struggled to get his shoes off. I pulled off his wet socks; his feet were swollen and blue.

I fussed over him, making him sit in front of the fire and bringing him a bowl of hot water to put his toes in. He almost cried with relief. ‘Oh, thank you so much, that’s better. Much better.’

Once both he and my father were settled, I began to prepare the family meal. Mom was busy upstairs feeding baby Andy. There wasn’t really much to do: boil some water and put a packet of spaghetti in it – it was all we had to eat.

I searched through the cupboards trying to find a tomato or a few bits of left-over cheese I could grate over it to make it nicer. But just as I was feeling gloomy about our situation something occurred to me. As poor as we were, badly dressed, hungry and cold, we faced these problems together, as a family. Just us. I carried in the food and plonked it down with a beaming smile.

After a few months, once we began getting government welfare benefits, our poverty eased. My parents had spent their lives deriding all governments as evil, yet now the government ‘system’ was the only thing saving their kids from starvation.

‘It won’t be for long,’ my father asserted, assuring us that the Apocalypse was still on track. It was just that the situation in France wasn’t quite as bad as Grandpa had feared. He warned us that this didn’t mean we could relax; we still had to be on our guard at all times.

In order to qualify for the benefits, the local government officials insisted we children had to attend intensive French language lessons.

It was my first real encounter with other children outside of The Family. I was struck by their smart school uniforms, which made me nervous, because uniforms always meant soldiers or other ‘system’ dangers, but I was also a little bit jealous. Our second-hand clothes marked us out as different. I liked the girls’ skirts and their smart blazers, and I was in awe of the confident way they spoke to each other. They looked so grown up, and although I felt like an outsider I was beginning to glimpse that perhaps we, not them, were the ones out of step.

I think we would have been badly bullied were it not for Matt and Marc’s popularity. Matt had my mother’s good looks, with a long dark ponytail and big brown eyes. He was a confident, funny joker, a natural leader of the pack. Despite this also being his first time mixing with outside children he had no problem making friends, somehow making it into the cool kids’ gang. I suspect they found his difference and background a bit edgy, much in the same way my mother had found my father’s background attractive when they first met. Marc was quieter than Matt, a brooding, sensitive type. Looks-wise he took after my father: he was tall with dark eyes, olive skin and thick black hair. He was a ladykiller.

Mom was thrilled when Joe graduated from the Teen training and flew out to France to join us. Sadly, to me he had become a stranger. The brother I had known was gone … He didn’t play or joke with us; he rarely even spoke unless spoken to first.

Joe only stayed a couple of months before deciding to return to Thailand and to a girlfriend he had left behind there.

As the year drew to a close we were still desperately poor, but we’d managed to kit ourselves out with hats, scarves, jackets and woollies, so we were warm at least. I had seen pictures of snow before, most memorably the snow-capped mountains in our weekly screening of The Sound of Music, but seeing it thick on the branches of the pine trees and carpeting the garden was magical.

That year we spent our first Christmas together as a family. On Christmas Eve I was so excited I could hardly sleep, the first time in my life being happy had kept me awake. When morning came I rushed in to wake up the younger ones.

‘Aimée, wake up. It’s Christmas. Come on, sleepy-head. Guy, time to get out of bed. Come on. Let’s go build a snowman.’

Like giddy lambs we tumbled down the stairs, to find my parents already standing in the kitchen sipping hot coffee.

I looked at my father hopefully. ‘Daddy, please can we go out and play before we say our prayers? Please.’

I really didn’t expect him to say yes. Back in the communes I’d have got the fly-swat for even daring to ask.

He beamed a big fat indulgent smile: ‘Go on, get out there. And make sure that snowman has a hat on or he’ll get cold!’

Vincent and Aimée cheered. Mom secured their knitted bonnets under their chins and made them put on their mittens.

‘This is going to be the best Christmas ever,’ Vincent declared.

And it was. After lunch of a roast chicken, vegetables and potatoes – not much, but a feast to us – we walked through the town as the snow fell in perfect round flakes. In the market square there was an outdoor carol service. We took our places alongside the systemites. They didn’t seem so different to us – children rosy cheeked and bundled up in winter coats, their moms and dads relaxed and happily holding hands. Thoughts of death, destruction and Armageddon didn’t even occur.

When the service ended we walked back home, happy and giddy as we scooped up snowballs to throw at each other.

That was the best day of my life.