What I have learned about Thom Babel through talking to him and by an old man who claims to be his friend
How it ends:
“He lived like he wanted to make amends for his life.”
He said.
“He was a very reclusive man, was he not?”
He asked.
I nodded and reached for my cup of coffee.
“I thought so. He never did seem like the person who would open himself to anyone.”
He said and reached for his cup of coffee.
The conversation was all his, and somehow he was not comfortable being the one taking the stage. He wanted me to take the stage, or at least come into the light and join the conversation, but I was more interested in listening to him than interjecting what I knew about him.
“After the war he was in a complete daze, and no one would dare blame him for that. Until the war ended, we all lived like animals, stealing, mugging, selling anything we could get our hands into, god we even sold our closest friend so we could live. And all the sudden we hear that the war is over. And some days later food started pouring in. It was almost a surreal nightmare the amount of food we were receiving. One of us ate and regurgitated until he choked on his vomit in sleep. One of us even stuffed himself with bread that his airway was stuffed up. We couldn’t believe for one second that more food was coming, so we ate ourselves to death thinking that we will never see these food again.”
After that, he took a sip of his coffee and closed his jacket up a bit. The weather was turning a bit chilly. The sun was out, but the wind was taking away the heat.
“Anyways, it was hard adjusting to the way things went after the war. Understand, we all stole when we wanted to eat, and now we had to work to earn our living? And that if we worked we would have a place to live, not just a burnt barrack or an abandoned building, but an actual place to live? It was so weird seeing our first proper pay, that wad of cash. It was so long we saw any money in our hands, for a second that cash looked like pieces of paper that everyone was passing for money.”
“But we adjusted, hard as it was we came to terms with the fact that war was over, and that we are to live like a civilized man, not an animal. And as we worked, our reasons came back, and as our reasons came back we started to grasp what we have done, and with that nightmares came.”
“I think he took it harder than anyone. I remember days when he was lying in bed eyes shut tight clutching himself and mumbling I’m sorry over and over. We all went through that days of our conscience eating itself out. Somewhere in our minds we knew that we could not and should not have done everything we did, but what could we have done? How could have we survived among the adults who were just as desperate as us and wanted to live even if it meant taking from the children? We convinced ourselves that we had to do this, or we will die.”
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How it starts:
Thom Babel was an elderly member of our community, reaching about to his 70’s. He was a quiet person, a reserved person, someone who would slightly bow to you instead of saying hi when you pass by him. He was never seen smoking a fag, never seen in a pub enjoying a pint, never seen outside in the park sitting on a bench enjoying the weather.
He was someone who locked himself in his room, doing something no one knows, and rarely talked to anyone when he went outside.
I met Thom Babel as a part of this community reach out program. We were assigned an elderly person that we would help out with grocery shopping, house cleaning, making meals and keeping them company and all. I was freshly out of job then and was looking to find a way of finding some ways to pay rent. This didn’t interfere with my sporadic work of tutoring English to immigrant children.
Thom Babel looked just like any dignified men in his latter years would look. He was clean shaven, he ironed his own clothing, he brushed his teeth in the morning and before he went to bed.
I met Thom Babel, around March, third months after I jointed the program. The air was clean, a bit crisp with chill but promised that Spring was coming soon. Thom Babel’s apartment was an ancient brick thing stained old with exhaust and bird feces. He lived on the third floor, the last one on the left at the end of a long hallway. When we first met, he was in white shirt and brown corduroy trousers.
“Hi, my name is Gary,”
“That’s enough, you’re only here because of the community program, nothing more is asked.”
That was our first exchange.
Thom Babel was the kind that knew what he liked and how he liked it, and he didn’t appreciate anyone mucking about with the way his things are. He winced slightly when I placed the coffee cup the wrong way, he didn’t look quite happy when I got the wrong brand of bread, he didn’t like it when I would place flower vase on a wrong surface. He didn’t really raise any explicit objection, but you could see in his face that you were messing about in the world he created for himself.
But he never raised any objection. All he did was just sigh and make a face that said “What could I do? I am old, I can not move about like I used to.”
Naturally, we didn’t talk much. He had his way, and he was not about to change anything. And I was nothing more than an intruder into his life. He wanted to see me go as soon as possible, and all I wanted was just a way to find extra income to support myself..
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Our lives would have stayed in that incongruent way, but if it did, I wouldn’t have been here in this cafe with this packet in front of me. It’s been said that things happen the way they are meant to, but if that is true then all the children beaten to death by their parents, all the animals born and raised so they can be slaughtered and line the butcher shop window, all the wild lives in the rain forest that are probably dying by the seconds because the rainforest is vanishing like dew drops before the sun light, all those things dying are meant to happen?
If the war didn’t happen, Thom Babel wouldn’t have to suffer everything he did, his mother wouldn’t have went through everything he said she did, and his friend wouldn’t have to suffer like he does, and I wouldn’t be sitting down in this cafe with this packet in front of me.
It sometimes makes me wonder that people who say things happen only in the way they are supposed to are just someone who’s been beaten down so horribly that they have to tell themselves things so they wouldn’t have their already bruised souls break down into pieces.
But I digress.
So we spent the first month not really talking to each other. I stayed out of his way and he corrected everything that I have misplaced or put it down at wrong angle.
He did grow a little soft on me after a few months, for instance he started calling me by my name, but still he maintained that what could I do face and corrected any mistakes I made.
Some more months passed and I was cleaning the bedroom when I noticed a rosary lying on a table by the bed. It was a simple wooden rosary, made smooth after years of being rubbed on by surface of flesh. All the details on it have been rounded out after years of being worn.
Then I heard Mr.Babel call to me from behind.
“Gary, put that rosary down.”
He said to me in a tone that was a little harder than he always used.
“I’m sorry Mr.Babel”
“Whether you are sorry or not is not the matter. Just put that rosary down and all will be well.”
So I put the rosary down, and he picked it up tenderly like it was something that could break at anytime, and he was trying to ask for its forgiveness about me touching it. After that, he made the what could I do face.
“Really, I’m sorry Mr.Babel”
“I told you, whether you are sorry or not is not important. Now, will you leave please.”
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Our lives after that was not just an incongruent lines, I was a stranger who intruded into his life and violated his privacy. He watched over everything I did whenever I visited him. He told me where I could move to and where I shouldn’t even dare step into.
“Gary, please move to the bathroom and clean up the sink and bathtub”, he would ask in his soft voice without any hint of care.
“Gary, you are coming too close to my bedroom. Please stay away.” He would say.
“Gary, please, you did not clean the window sills properly. Can you kindly do them over again.”
I would time and time again apologize to him about touching the rosary, and each time he accepted the apology like a friend would forgive a friend who battered him to a bloody rug.
We grew distant. He grew colder, though he never shouted. I couldn’t do anything lest I lose my extra paycheck. One thing that I still feel grateful to this day is that he never raised any complaints to the chair of the community program. I consider that as a show of his appreciation towards me.
After some times, Mr.Babel started to become visibly ill. He grew thinner by the day, and when December came, he looked like he was going to give up his ghost, and I was the only one left that could attend to him (He wasn’t admitted to a hospice because he refused to leave his apartment room).
It was an especially cold night when he called to me. I cooked him stew, cleaned his body and laid him under blanket. By this time his health needed me to stay some extra time so I could call the emergency service when something went wrong.
He called out to me, told me to sit by the bed (by this time he had to let me into his bedroom so he could be carried around in his room).
“Gary, can you reach into the box by the bed and retrieve my rosary please?”
I took the rosary out as gently as I could and laid it on his open left palm.
“Well, Gary, I am dying.”
“Mr.Babel please. You are not dying.”
“You are a poor liar. I am dying. It is what I’ve decided and it will be so. But first give me a glass of spirit. There should be a bottle in the pantry that I saved for the holidays.”
“I don’t know if you should be drinking.”
“Just do as I tell you.”
So I brought a bottle of spirit and two glasses to bedside, poured him some fingers of whiskey, and handed him the glass. He kindled the glass in his hands and took a sip. He coughed a bit, his face turned red. After the coughing, he slowly closed his eyes.
“Gary, I am afraid of dying. I feel like I haven’t paid back what I owe to the society.”
“I’m sure you’ve done enough for all of us Mr Babel.”
“I envy your ignorance Gary. You can say anything you want because you have no idea what I’ve done in my life. I thank you for it.”
“You’re welcome Mr Babel.”
“Now, Gary, it is getting late. Can you leave me please. I do not think I need anymore help tonight.”
“Okay. Good night Mr Babel”
He limply wave at me.
He passed away two months after that. No one came to his funeral except for one aging man. He didn’t cry when he saw Mr Babel in his casket. He paid his respect and out his way.
And with that my community program was over.
Luckily I was able to find another job as a desk clerk at a solicitor’s office. And so Thom Babel died and no one will ever remember him.
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Afterwards to come before how it ends:
After the whole community service thing and some years later, I was greeted by someone who claimed to be his friend called.
It was a day in the beginning of December. The days were starting to get cold, leaves that turned red and yellow were starting to fall, and I was seeing some who I thought I could stay together until one of us dies.
His call came when I was cleaning the house.
“Hello, this is Roland Flint.” The voice said over the phone. “You do not know me, and that is probably for the better. All that needs to be understood is that I was a friend of Thom Babel.”
“I was wondering if I could meet you over a coffee.”
“I do not know you. I do not have any reason to believe you sir.”
“Please, I have something for you from Thom. You need to see me.”
I decided to meet him at the cafe around the corner. I thought if anything I could run and tell myself that it was just an old pervert.
Roland Flint limped into the cafe, and at first glance I realized that he was that only aging man who attended Mr Babel’s funeral. He looked like a mouse that lived way too long on fiber and nothing else. He looked beaten, weathered, tired, and he had the air of someone who has accepted that he is about to die. Looking at him, I couldn’t help but think, how could this generation, this generation that lived through a war, look so downtrodden that they all looked like they couldn’t wait to die?
We didn’t talk at all. All that Mr.Flint did was sip his coffee slowly and mentioned that he was a friend of Mr Babel. That he met Mr Babel after the war, that they used to live together, and grew up together.
“We did everything together, we survived together.”
And he went quiet again.
After some more silence, he said to me
“I’m here because Babel wanted to hand over his diary to you. God knows what’s inside. He never showed it to anyone. All I could tell was that he was he was trying to write down something that he couldn’t keep in himself. I think he was writing because he believed it will exorcise whatever was killing him from the inside.”
“You know, Babel used to tell me ‘One day I will pass away, and I can not wait for that day when my breathing stops and I no longer have to be terrified of what my memories bring upon me. I truly can not wait for the day when I die. It’s oh so terrible, I wake up thinking that I have to live another day, and when night closes in, I weep because all that I have done come back to me through the cracks on the wall’ He also told me ‘I do not think that there is any happiness left for me in this world.’”
After that, he handed me a package no bigger than a notebook, and before I could say thank you or let me pay for the coffee, he got up, grabbed me by the hand and said
“Young man, I will be the last of the generation to remember the war. No one will remember what exactly happened after I die. You do not know the relief I get knowing that, do you?”
After that he fished out some changes from his pocket,threw them on the table and walked out. I looked at the package that contained his diary and thought what should I do.
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In the last two months of his life, Mr Babel really let himself go and went into delirium a lot. He mistook me for someone I never knew, and sometimes he insisted that I was his long lost friend.
When he was not delirious, he talked to me about his life. He was a horrible story teller and I couldn’t string things together, but from what I gathered so far his life story was like this:
Mr Thom Babel was born on May 21st some 70 years ago. He was born in this town, and back then it was not such a big town. It was some wayward stopping point where people exchanged goods and some men stayed for some rest. God knows how it rebuilt itself after the war. It all looked different then. Every houses were made of bricks, none of this steel beam high rise existed at all. People used to drive their carts by the means of their horses leading them. Electric light was finally made, and people were surprised how bright things looked even after dark.
Mr Babel was a quiet child, spending his days in his mother’s arms reading whatever he could find. Whether he could read it or not did not matter. All that mattered was that he was spending time in his mother’s arms.
As he grew the city started to shine bright, some of the carts were replaced by motor vehicles, goods were starting to be stored in a box that kept them cold and fresh. But the box did not last long, so people still needed to replace the box at the exchange so the goods could stay cold.
The war started when Mr Babel was about eight. He remembers that some men were talking in a heated manner about the war. Of course no one believed that anyone would even dare to attack a town as small as this, so all that took place was talking. And the government, the government must have thought the same, that no one would even think to attack a landmass this small. And it worked for a while. At least until the government was winning the war. It was not like the government was winning on its own. The surrounding countries were gaining on the enemy and they were just losing their footholds, that was all. And they saw us, this small land.
In the last days of the war, when he was about 10 years old, the enemy came to attack the city. Mr Babel, in his child mind thought that the city walls would protect him and his family. And protect the city walls did. They stood against the pounding and the crumbling the enemies lashed out. The raid went on for days, and the city wall stood brave, but on the fourth day the wall cracked and they poured in like locusts. The sound that the wall made when it crumbled, the site of them pouring in like one single giant living organism, their loud yelling like a last dying scream of women and men and children mixed together, they haunted his dreams.
They destroyed everything, light poles, vehicles, just about everything they could get their hands on. Men and Woman died like flies, they were torn to shreds, heads smashed in like over ripe apples. His mother barely escaped with Mr Babel in her arms. He remembers seeing blood everywhere, bodies scattered around and the remains of the city in ruins. His mother ran to the nearest train station, where she thought to ride away from the enemies. Against the thousand others who thought the same and fought for a spot, she somehow managed to get herself in the train to the farthest city possible. When she got off the train, Mr Babel’s mother finally realized that she wasn’t even thinking about what she has just done.
Mr.Babel’s mother stayed a couple of months in this unknown city among the confusion of shouting about what was happening. When she came back to her hometown she found everything in ruins. Her home was razed to the ground. All her belongings were ripped apart. Nothing of her past life remained intact.
She had tried to reconstruct her life, but with everybody else trying to do the same, she found that she was running out of choices of work. Then one day Mr Babel found his mother bringing in a man that she brought to her bed. At first he thought it was a new person in her life. But as the man left he paid her some cash, and soon after his mother was bringing in numerous men.
Mr Babel didn’t feel any humiliation or contempt towards his mother for choosing to live like this. But he did feel from time to time jealous towards the men who slept with her. He thought “But that’s my mother. Why are you touching her.”
I understand that it’s a disgusting thing to even consider. Men sleeping with your mother when your child is only a breath away. But when you consider Mr Babel was the only thing his mother has left, then you might feel like you’d want to keep that child close to you so he won’t disappear.
Mr Babel never said why he ran away from his home, nor how he became what he is, but he did say that, probably in order to explain himself, he didn’t want to smell men on the money his mother spent for him. He didn’t want to be reminded what his mother had done for living.
.
Mr Babel, he never told me what exactly he had done, but he did say he was sorry. And that as the town was rebuilt, and as everything was getting rebuilt and as the town grew bigger, he felt like nothing felt real.
“I saw houses and apartments get rebuilt, and they would stand there unharmed with nothing to demolish it to rubbles. But they were starting to grow back little by little, and people too, they started laughing and play music and sometimes they would even go out to eat. Unimaginable! One moment the town was in ruins and people were eating out of garbage pails, and now they were enjoying themselves!”
”It was very surreal, those years. I could not believe that what was standing in front of me was real. Everything that I held in my hand felt light like air, nothing I ate tasted real, nothing I gazed looked like they were rooted in this world. I lived my life in haze, it was just impossible to think that those dreadful days were over and that we could all go out and be marry again.”
He said to me as he lay on his bed, usually after sipping a drop of whiskey. He cradled his glass in his hands, letting the existence of the glass and the taste of whiskey be the agents that brought back his memory.
“Many years after I thought about what my mother had to endure to raise me. Her beauty placed her as the favorite pet of those men, and that earned her meager living for both of us. And when they, those men, were bored with her, their perversity forced her into the lowest that a woman or a man should bear. They made her perform all sorts of horrible things. They did everything they can to break her. It was like watching a cat playing with its food until it was dead. I didn’t exactly watch them do things to her. All I could hear was her muffled voice saying no, please, don’t. She said they are breaking her. Men just laughed at her, and they carried on.”
“What I’ve done, what I endured, they were all horrible. One should not be exposed to such things. Yes, when you look back at that time, you could say that I was simply a victim of the situation, and what I have done after I left home was simply a means to survival. But no matter how much excuses you could say what is inside your head and heart will stay with you and torment you until the day you die. All I could say is, what could I do? How else could I have survived?”
He said to me half asleep and went to sleep with his whiskey still in his hands. I lifted the glass from his hands and turned the lights off until I he was sound asleep.
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He didn’t talk at all in his last days. He just spent the rest of his days staring out the window like he has finally let go of that final piece of his soul and he was now just waiting for his body to expire. I would implore him to go on with his story, but he would refuse by saying
”It has taken aging to this old flesh to come to start forgiving myself. I think it will take my death bed to confess anything. It’s all still too early.”
He died two months after. In his deathbed he took my hands and said
“It was all unbearable. All those memories. I will never forgive what I’ve done. I was not a man, I was a horrible beast. No one should ever forgive my action.”
”Gary, Gray please listen, time does not heal all wounds. Wounds will stay open. They will turn sour, they will blacken, they will eat into flesh, they will ooze pus until your breathing stops. All that time does for you is to give you enough space to forget that you are feeling pain. And people mistake this forgetting of pain as forgiving themselves.”
And he took his last breath, and my community service was over like that.
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I stayed in my seat and looked at the package. Inside of it was probably the diary that Mr.Babel has left for me. If I open it, I will probably see what he has seen, and with it I will join the ranks of them that remembers what he did. But they are all going to die, and they all said in unison that they can’t wait for the day they will die and that no one will ever remember what they did and point their fingers at them. These people, they all did something they regret to this day, and they are all looking forward to death so they can all forget what they did. What right do I have in keeping their memories alive? How could I remember this and not disappoint them? I mean, what could I do?
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