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Before I Could Be Born
Before I could be born I had to make a major decision, of where to and whom to.
The choice fell on the small town of thirty thousand inhabitants located in Southern Slovakia.
It was the first "bad choice" of my life. But after being acquainted with this body and mind for almost 38 years now, I am not surprised.
My second "bad choice" was to allow my body to be conceived in an illicit relationship, between a 17 year old small town virgin and a 19 year old city slicker.
Shortly after I started to take form inside the luscious body of the beautiful young girl I choose for mother, the father to be enlisted in the army.
A telegram, I am sure quite unpleasant, called him home in March of 1958 to attend to his newborn daughters christening, that was to be executed in the catholic church of the city.
The religious christening and the secular wedding took place at the same day. So, it happened that I was crying along with the older woman, whom I later recognized as my moternal grandmother, at the wedding ceremony of my clueless adolescent parents.
And then, night followed the unfortunate life binding event. And it was I, the one privileged to be held to the breasts of the girl bride instead of the groom. He didn't appreciate the idylic scene at all.
While she was priding herself in her newly found motherhood happiness, he made several attempts to enter her life-giving wound.
The expression on the lovely face of the woman, whose body I perceived as my own extension changed from a smile to a contortion, and the normally sweet milk that I enjoyed, suddenly had a taste of tart. Even though at that point I didn't really know what tart was, only later by acquiring more knowledge, did I identified the taste as such.
The situation of my mother's suffering affected me too, so I decided to express my annoyance by loud shrieks, to which my father reacted with fast removal of his unwanted body not only from my mother, and the hotel room itself, but from our life’s as well. I wished it remained the same for ever, because I enjoyed having my mother for a personal slave.
Unfortunately my fate changed to worse after two years when my fathers time of service ended , and convinced by his mother, my grandmother, and her mother my great grandmother, he reluctantly, returned to his wife. Little did I know, that his return will result in my removal. And as it were, I had been transported to my moternal grandmother, to be reared and cared for in a little village.
And summer came once again. It was the year of 1961, when I and my grandmother boarded a bus that took us to a neighboring village to visit my great aunt and her husband my great uncle. The trip turned out to be my first bus tour experience as well as my first sexual one. My great uncle took me in his lap never to release me before the visit was over. On our way home, my grandmother expressed her dissatisfaction with the unfriendly behavior I was exhibiting toward uncle and aunt in refusing to talk to either one of them. And since I still tried to sort out what just took place sitting in uncle’s lap, I restrained myself from responding to her pleas. This trip made me realize, that I was in possession of something that could be of interest to those of opposite gender. Encouraged by the experience with my great uncle, one Sunday, dolled up in a white summer dress, I flirtatiously approached a boy, just to hear him point and shout, Gypsy, at me. So, I understood that being a Gypsy canceled out my being a girl.
In my formative years I mistakenly thought that I was Magyar, since my mother tongue was Magyar, until, I was informed, about my not being Magyar but rather a Gypsy, and that, Stinking Gypsy.
Can it be that being Gypsy cancels out my nationality? Confused I ventured back to my grandmother's house with a decision in my mind to take a muteness vow. It was the year of 1962 when I stopped speaking for a year or so. I refused to pronounce anything in the language that I didn't belong to. After all I was a "Stinking Gypsy" And since my grandmother didn't speak the "Stinking Gypsy "language there was nobody to teach it to me. But after a while I got bored with muteness, and I contemplated the idea of inventing my own language. I was in the middle of working out my plan, when my grandmother took me by hand, put a red patent leather bag on my back an walked me to the school. To my greatest amusement in this school all of the people communicated in a very strange, completely unintelligible language. It made me very happy, because I realized that these people all must be Stinking Gypsies too, since they invented their own languages. I approached them during recess and tried to talk to them in my own invented vocabulary, but what a surprise, they laughed at me, and signed toward their foreheads with their pointing fingers. I understood, they had me for a fool, so I took my red patent leather backpack and ran away. That day I encountered yet an other group of enemy, called Slovaks. Eventually I learned to speak both the languages so that I could understand the curses that were aimed at me, the "Stinking Gypsy".
Then I grew up and defected the country that never loved me. And I learned an other language, the German, but that was much later on.
Before all of that happened I had to go through an other life threatening revelation. By that time though nothing took me by surprise any more.
So, I felt just a little bit embarrassed and wanted to run out of the world just a tiny bit, when a tender creature laughed into my face, while I was trying to express the deepest of my feelings to her.
After that, I started running around with boys at day time, because that was the thing to do, but at night I dreamed of girls. Unfortunately I was never able to enjoy even a dream pleasure with them, because I imposed moral judgment over myself.
Although at the time I had no idea, why exactly was my "perversion" the "hermaphrodism of my soul" my" genital neurosis" my " moral folly", my " physical imbalance" , to be eradicated.
Terror crept into my dreams.
I used to wake up in the middle of the night with a terrible bitter taste in my mouth. Whatever could have been nice turned out to be distasteful. I have been caught infla grante doing something inappropriate and being punished for it, have been persecuted, on the charges of unnatural, sinful behavior, felt awfully guilty, dirty, low etc.etc.
On top of everything mother discovered my diary. That day I was amazed at the ability of a human being to issue forth such abundant quantity of saliva in such a short period of time and aim it so precisely. Maybe it was mother's speciality. I will never know. She surely generated a record amount of it that day. She aimed especially at the eyes.
Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen I painted fervently, picture after picture, for different reasons. Sometimes I painted to live up to my artist aunt's expectations, other times to get my fathers approval, or to simply show off in front of my schoolmates. I wanted to show them that the "Stinking Gypsy" was indeed different, even better then they were. And then, there were times when I closed the doors behind and spent nights and days in my tiny studio indulging in the greatest of pleasures by smearing the smooth shiny beautiful colors of oil paints on canvas. I could inhale the aroma of the paints for hours, and feel happy. I used to get so lost in painting, that when I heard a singing voice, I didn't recognize it for mine, and got startled by it.
At the age of sixteen I started longing for attention again, so, I made my body sick with a kidney disease. It had to be severe, otherwise it wouldn't matter. My plan worked, I did get my mother worried and present. After this experience of both pleasure and pain together, I already knew about three ways of getting attention. After my first kidney surgery, I inflicted on myself during my lifetime an other seven surgeries worth of attention. I learned to derive pleasure through boys, painting and surgeries, in other words, sex, art,and disease.
Then 1982 came and after several futile attempts to gain acceptance to the only Fine Arts Academia in the country, my mother decided, that it was time for me to get married. And since there wasn't really anything better to do at the time, I fulfilled her wish.
Then she wanted to become a grandmother, so I bore a child.
It was part of the married life anyway. I curled my hair, put an apron on and cooked dinners for my husband, who never cared to come home on time. As my food kept getting colder and colder every day, and I realized, that this was not going to be one of those marriage pastorals, I started to long for a change. Dragging my restless body and soul through borders and borders, I arrived in Germany. I was young and beautiful, full of hopes. Learned the language, tried to speak, nobody would listen.
There I was again, an outsider.
This time nobody seemed to mention my original identity, which was the "Stinking Gypsy", any more. Instead I became an "Aulander." I was simply an unwanted one. But since there is always something good in everything bad, my unpleasant life experiences made me start thinking about the reason of my existence. But, then I put the thinking aside for a while again, because I decided to immigrate to the USA, the country of aliens.
A new language to master, a new culture to adapt to. I was the same, different as every body else. I thought I could be happy, if I just found the peace of mind, I was after. So, I traveled from place to place in search for true happiness. 1990-91 found me in San Diego California. An eternal dreamer I enrolled in a Painting for the Theater, course. And that’s where it happened. One sunny afternoon found me lying on the bottom of the 30 foot deep cement paint pit. It didn't frighten me much. It surprised me, to find myself there, it annoyed me, that I couldn't move, and it certainly knocked the breath out of me, to fall on my back so far from above. "Oh well," I thought," so, this is it, I am going to die now." "Oh my God." OK, I knew that whatever the person concentrates on at the moment of her death that she will become in her next life time. So, I kept repeating out loud the name of God. I didn't feel pain, I didn't feel fear, and I felt like, I was my voice. But God didn't come to take me away, instead the paramedics arrived with their stretchers, and strapped me down and lifted me up, and pulled me through the little hole, that I fell through, and took me to the nearby hospital, from where they almost transported me further, after discovering my lack of a proper health insurance.
It didn't matter to me,really, where I was going to expire, but it seemed to make a difference to my husband who followed me around on my journeys of life. He promised to pay for my treatment. How he meant to do that, remained a puzzle to my half conscious mind, but he did take it upon himself, so, I said, fine, and while pushed on the cart into the X-Ray room, he lifted up my child to me to see, but the child didn't seem to acknowledge any connection with the horribly violated body that she previously used to call mother. The doctors reassembled the tormented body with screws, plates and rods and stitched the skin together like my maternal grandmother used to stitch dresses for the villagers. A year of body cast wearing followed. Unable to use my legs I spent my days wheeling myself around in a wheelchair. This was the year of my largest canvases. I painted and prayed and painted and prayed and painted and prayed some more. These were fruitful times for me. I understood that my body ran around to much, it needed a major slowing down, so that the I and it could catch up with each other. But I still didn't know who the I was. I thought and thought, and one day when I was on my feet again, I took my daughter, age thirteen to see a movie that dealt with a lesbian relationship. Perhaps the timing wasn't right, because on our way home, my daughter kept spitting in every direction and hurling abuses at the movie we saw. It must have been in her genes, she must have inherited this quality from my mother, her grandmother, whom she never met.
"Well, good try," I thought to myself. Did I search for approval? Did I need to validate my existence, and the quality of it? Or did I simply want somebody else to take responsibility for me? What was my problem? Eventually, in exchange for a meager three thousand dollars worth of therapy, I have been informed that, what I was suffering from, was a multiple displacement syndrome.
OK, I said to myself, so, now what? I am displaced, displaced socially, racially, and biologically, so let me try to fix this condition. In those days I still believed that things could or should be fixed, instead of accepted them for what they were. First of all I should find my roots, I decided, and so, I flew to India, where my predecessors came from. But the Indians called me madam. I wasn't one of them, and I wasn't ready to learn Hindi either.
And then I met Sai Baba, and he told me:" You are God! "
Now that line kept me thinking for the past few years of my life.
Is it possible, that all the self-indulgence and self-pity is of no value at all? Is it possible that gender, race, nationality, social status do not matter ? Is it possible, that my life experiences were there to teach me to look beyond? Is it possible, that it all is only an illusion, and I shouldn't be caught up in it? Is it possible?
Maybe a day will come when I'll figure it all out.
So, keep close, because if I do, I will be willing to share.