snakechahmah | 13.8 Write about your father.

Regurgitated here | July 2018
Write about your father

My father knew how to cut deep with comedy, to laugh through sadness and to sacrifice the deepest, most sacred, parts of himself. I should know.

He sacrificed me so that I could live.

He sacrificed the laughter we shared of jokes that no one else understood, the small feet of a wee giddy girl standing on his larger ones and being led through a waltz that was much too complex for my feet to untangle but a joy that had be shared nonetheless.

We were loud, and boisterous, and creative together. He was my best friend. He was the better finger painter but he always hung my crappy "artwork" on the wall. I was the better singer, so I would sing to him on car trips instead of turning on the radio. He'd have “cousins” smuggle American tapes to us - Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Holiday and Duke Ellington were my favorite, but our song was Mambo Italiano, the Dean Martin version. We didn't care how bad our faux-Italian accents, punctuated by our heavy German ones, were when we sang the song in English with gusto. We just sang it until we laughed so hard that our cheek muscles hurt. It was such a fun song. We sang and danced to it before every show. He taught me to dance before I could basically walk.

Papa ran an underground cabaret club in East Germany that secretly fought and spoke out against the Communist system, much like his father before him had tackled Nazism. He made me stupid brave and told me that silence was just as bad as participating in someone's oppression, worse even because silence meant that you weren't strong enough to choose a side and carry the weight of your convictions. For an artist, his disgust for a weakness of character was almost as militaristically draconian as the political system that oppressed East Berlin. He had the passion of a bohemian writer and a dedication to art, dance, political satire and resistance movements. He had a knack for pissing off the establishment too. He also had a brother on the other side that he disagreed with bitterly and who was a terrorist, a best friend that was in trouble with the Stasi, and a future that was missing more then a few high notes.

But he was God to me and I was created in his image, sometimes I think that I am more him than I am myself because he was such a good template of what I thought a human being should be, so I copied him - we have the same convictions about loyalty, friendship, family, love and social justice and bright inquisitive eyes that were always filled with laughter, as if we alone knew that there was always a good joke that could soften a hard blow. But the joke was on me.

The wall coming down in Berlin was a reprieve from the walls of oppression closing in on my father at the time. We ran. But it turned out that we didn't run far enough away to escape the tendrils of a dying East German intelligentsia that wanted to snuff out the last remnants of dissent. We were in America when it happened—a "car accident" that nearly killed us all during the beginning of my senior year in High School, years later. Apparently, it was one of many attempts that I wasn't entirely aware of then, although now I can recall tension, odd events, dramatic arguments and strange behavior between my parents. Papa turned to the only people he thought could help - criminals. By turning to a crime family, he left his own. And then he died. For us. For me. For the protection that it afforded us and the retribution that bit back with finality at the old dying remnants of the old establishment by lingering aging agents that had nothing better to do. They were fossils themselves but couldn't accept it in life so they did in death. He was reborn into someone that I didn't recognize. I didn't have to until years later when I found out that he was still alive, but only for a breath longer. Only long enough for me to take another good look into the mirror.

He did horrendous, unforgivable things to save my mother and me. Trafficking things. Human rights abuse things. A friend told me recently to never to have heroes. That they only end up disappointing you. I'm shattered by the guilt that a part of me still sees him as a hero, despite his transgressions. My father sacrificed us so that there could be a me.

But it's worse than that, isn't it? I saw myself in my father; I let myself be shaped by who he was and what he taught me, I took what I thought was the best of him and made it mine but, it turns out that the best people do the worst things for the people that they love. And now I am following in his footsteps, trying to save someone. Many someones that I've never met but who deserve to be treated with compassion, respect, and who should be free, just like my father taught me years ago. I need to dismantle his network.

I'd like to think that a part of him that wasn't afraid of losing me and therefore making the crimes he committed on my behalf pointless, would want me to. But how many people will I hurt in this pursuit?

Just like when I was little and used to step on his feet, he leads me now as he did then, step-by-step, dancing to a darker tune that isn't the Mambo Italiano. I don't remember the day that we stopped laughing together but, I do know that my father always used to let me have the last laugh.

Muse: Ezera Baader
Fandom: OC. Based loosely on Cabaret | Farewell to Berlin
Words: 838