Don't Ask Me!

Mother, I am going away, and you will not come with me on my journey, because you are weak.

You are too weak to leave that man they call my father — and I deny what they say.

He may be the cause of my existence, but he is not the one who made of me the young man you see.

Where is he — the one who was more to me than a father and a mother? You lost him, while I was in my heedless boyhood, sensing nothing of what was real.

I remember — and how wretched my memories are — a happy childhood, in which I had a tender mother who watched over me night and day, a gentle father who played with me in his free hours, and a loving boy whose eyes never ceased watching me.

That was my childhood, as distant now as happiness is distant from me. But it did not last; it did not even reach into my boyhood.

Do you think I did not miss you, when you drew away from me little by little?

Do you truly believe I was too young to notice my father's coldness and his indifference toward me?

I wept long in the arms of that boy, my elder brother.

But children soon grow used to their new life.

Mother, you do not know what treasures of humanity and love my brother's soul contained.

Do you know me well, Mother? Do you know that child you bore of your own body — that young man whom people describe with every fine word, sighing when they mention his parents?

I am not your son, nor my father's son, but the ward of my brother.

My brother, older than I by a few years; my brother, who joined humility and calm to his tenderness and his ability; my brother, who looked with hope toward his future; my brother, who was everything to me — what have you all done with him?

Are you a mother, or only a wife?

With what eye do you look at him — that man of frozen feelings whom they call my father? How could your heart — a mother's heart — consent to sacrifice the future of your elder son for the sake of a man who no longer knows anything of the world except that it is a gambling hall?

I knew pain for the first time when I saw my brother in pain. He told me nothing. But are not the days and nights I spent under his protection enough for me to understand him?

Mother, did you never notice his passion for learning? I think I knew more of his dreams and his hopes for the future than you now know of me.

And with utter cruelty you tore a sweet hope away from him and made him, before his time, a breadwinner.

Or do you want me to thank you, because you made me his one hope and the first concern of his life?

I implore you, Mother, answer me: when that gambler asked me to do him a service, leaning on his fatherhood, was I not right to answer him: 'You are not my father'?

I was on the point of disowning you too, Mother, but for the tearful look you cast on us, my brother and me, every day, before you followed your husband to keep watch over him.

Mother, my brother loved me, and he was ready to sacrifice himself for us all; and so he did not hesitate when you asked him to give up his studies and go to work.

But I am not like him. I want to live and enjoy my life. My brother raised me on respect, love, and mercy. But I have respected no one but him; I have felt love in my life for no one but him; and I will not be merciful to those who showed him no mercy.

It would have been more fitting for me to become like him in humility and kindness, and until lately I believed those qualities were in me. But when he went, I became selfish, hard, a lover of myself — like that man who is called my father.

Mother, my brother has died. He died of exhaustion, and nothing is left to hold me to the house or bind me to the homeland.

I am going, Mother. Do not ask me where — I myself do not know.