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Destinies
By
Bart Alder
Copyright
Ó 1999
‘Destinies don’t make
themselves.’
Those were the words spoken by my father to my mother when she asked why
he’d abducted her.
She cried for weeks after they were married. Strange how
it works in our country, really. We all know it makes little sense, but the
tradition sticks. If a woman is abducted, it is deemed to be her fault and the
only way she can prevent the shame of her crime descending on her whole family,
is to marry her kidnapper.
Shame might just be a word to people outside my village,
they might say it shames us all to talk about kidnapping wives and blaming the
victim for the crime. They might say that we make her a victim twice by forcing
her to marry against her will. I happen to agree with them. But in my world I
am in a minority.
In my world that word shame is also a social force. My
village is very old, hundreds of
years old and the forces which formed it are still very strong. Shame keeps
women marrying kidnappers. Almost a century of rule by the Soviets could not
wipe out this cycle of abduction, shame and marriage.
Kidnappings are not truly common around my village these
days, we do not roam the countryside stealing wives in hordes. I should not
like to present a false picture. Abduction is in decline, but abductions are still regular enough. I hear of one
every eight months or so. In olden times, every last one of those abductions
would end at the church steps with toasts and forced smiles, but today it’s
less than two thirds. The old Soviet ways gave women a taste for freedom and
many do not like the return to all of the old traditions. There is still a
mountain of shame, but there is also a growing hill of resistance.
Kidnapping sounds so wrong, as though it could never be
right… but how else is a poor man to find a wife? A wife in my town will cost a
husband as many as ten goats. A girl
down the road was purchased from her father by a rich man for his ten year old
son. For when the boy comes of age, you understand. The price was said to be
fifteen goats and some land. That was
not three years ago. After hearing the news other fathers with marriageable
daughters soon put their prices up but there weren’t the goat numbers to
sustain it. As daughters began to age and remained unmarried, slowly prices
came down again.
In my world, a rich man can marry whoever he likes and a
poor man must die in silence, never daring to love. In my world, poverty is not
the same crime as it is in other countries. Here the poor can live and eat and
eke out a living with self respect and dignity. The one thing they are not permitted to do however is to
inflict a woman with the burden of their love.
It’s so hard to even get to know women in this life. You say ‘Hello.’ They say ‘Hello.’ You say
‘What’s your name?’ and her father
replies ‘Where are my ten goats?’
Even to say hello is to touch upon marriage. And saying
hello without having the goats to pay for the rest of the conversation is
already attempting to steal something from the father of the girl and it robs
her of her dignity also. He will certainly beat you away with a sturdy broom
rather than let you near his prize. He will sell her at auction to the highest
bidder and feel perfectly honourable doing so.
And who on this earth has
ten goats to spare, ignoring for a moment the extravagance of fifteen?
As this tale of destinies begins, my family have two goats between all four of us. We are
fortunate since both animals are healthy and young and soon, if they remain free of disease from the crops, they
will certainly breed. We weave mats for sale, cure our own meats and grow our
own vegetables all from home. We do not struggle today as much as we have in
the past.
We are not even wealthy enough for a one goat wife however. This is why I am twenty three and still
unmarried. If I am not married by thirty, I expect I will die alone. Although,
once a man of thirty five did marry a girl from the next village. He finally
saved up enough goats to meet the father’s gradually lowering prices and she waited
for him. She was rather plain faced and was not in high demand by kidnappers or
other suitors. They are happy together. There are still some beautiful stories
where love triumphs, even in this place where commerce rules all marriage.
Most people in my
village live something like my family. They have the same daily concerns. Food,
good weather, good fortune, good honour, good friendship, and good love. We all
seek out a family of our own, so marriage is always a pressure for the young. A
woman is expected to have a husband before the age of twenty. Twenty-two is
ancient for a woman to be without a suitor or a husband. For men it is
different.
A poor man such as myself knows that his only hope for a wife is to kidnap one.
When faced with a bleak future of fifty long years without comfort, love and
friendship, it is little wonder some men choose to kidnap their brides. Of
course it is wrong. Many of the men who do it are not happy to do it, but
miserable. They sense no other option and pursue it out of desperation to
escape their solitude rather than an evil need to steal a woman’s liberty.
I myself have considered it many times. I have met and seen some beautiful women. I felt it was
a crime to love them so much and not
kidnap them. How could the earth be filled with such incredible temptation?
A poor man should know his place in this life. It is not
for him to question love, nor is it his role to act on love but to know it is
not for him to feel such things. It is his lot to amass goats in hope. There are
only so many goats however. Some men will always be too poor to afford love. So
long as there is poverty in my town, men will steal women and so long as there
is shame, families will force those women to marry their abductors.
My mother lost her education because my
father kidnapped her. She tells my younger sister that she must never agree to
marrying a kidnapper. I hate the thought of kidnapping a wife, but as a man in
my twenties, with a heart which pines for love every day, a heart with a
deepening yearning which remains tantalisingly unfulfilled, I understand the
hunger to find a wife better than I might like to admit. Those are your only choices when you are poor
like me… kidnap or die lonely.
Some nights, with the crowd of stars boring into your solitude
and the chilly winds curling into your mind, dying lonely looks horrifyingly
inevitable and stealing a wife is the only escape from that inevitability.
Indeed your mind soon turns towards explaining how much sense an abduction makes. It makes the most sense of course, when you are moved most by love’s brain
sapping power.
A wife will make you strong, you will do better with a wife. With a wife to work
for and a family to tend to you feel you will become a success, your family
will feel proud of you and you will do honour to your wife for marrying you…
She will learn to love you. When she sees how you love her, she will be
persuaded… Somehow, when you face a life of wrestling with your lonely bed
sheets in the cold, a life of reaching out for love in a dream, waking only to
find tears in your eyes, then over time, stealing a wife begins to seem
rational, even important.
My mother has such strong feelings against wife-napping
and she made them so plain through my childhood, that every time I felt my mind wandering amongst visions of a
marriage proposal at knife point, I felt my mother’s severe reproach inside my
skull, resonating murderously with huge waves of thrashing guilt. I feel a
singular torment in this life. I am a loving man but a poor man. I fall in love
twice each day, yet I cannot touch the thing I love for fear of becoming the
thing I hate. My own father.
I hated him so much as a child that it was all I could do
to not poison his dinner each night. He would beat my mother and me regularly
when he fell upon hard times. Since he was a surly, selfish man, hard times
followed him around the place and fell on him frequently. He was a monster. He
believes to this day that he saved my mother from a life of embarrassment. She
had planned to study at a university in Moscow on a scholarship but he told her
that she’d have made an imbecile of herself, a foolish country girl in a giant
metropolis. He tells us all we are painful idiots.
On my fifth birthday my mother gave me a pet dog. The dog
got worms and ate a lot of food and so my father killed it, claiming that we
could not afford the animal. I cried so he beat my mother for giving me a gift
we couldn’t afford to keep. The puppy was four weeks old. Even with the worms
it still ate less than me. I hadn’t even settled on a name for him. One week
later, my father bought himself new shoes. He had three pairs of perfectly good shoes already. He killed my dog
because he hated there to be any happiness. I don’t know what made my father so
evil. All my life I have feared him. My only terror greater than being killed
by him was becoming just like him.
Even with years of unrequited love assiduously scraping
layers of sanity from my brain, with the building and natural hunger for a
woman now steaming out my ears, I still couldn’t
bring myself to kidnap a wife. It would mean a personal defeat of the spirit
which I knew I would never recover from. My mother would never forgive me, my
sister would spit on me. Only my father would condone it and that would be
harder to bear than all my mother’s scorn. With his blessing, their hate for me
would pale next to the hate I would bear for myself.
When my good friend Zhou told me that he had met his
future wife I was overjoyed for him. I knew that he was too poor to marry her
by ordinary means so I assumed from the outset that she and he had planned her
kidnap together.
It is still common for poorer young lovers to find each
other one night, talk a while, fall in love and plan a kidnap together. Young
couples who are secretly in love fear for their future life. Until she is
married, she is a target for love-smitten abductors. If the man is too poor to
approach the father ( Offering too little to the father is a terrible insult.
It suggests that you think his daughter is worthless.) and if the woman fears
marrying anyone else, then the man arranges to kidnap her at a convenient time.
For the honour of her family, they are married. There is no shame for anyone,
no offence to the father, the couple have chosen each other and nobody loses
any goats.
To my mind it is the sum of happiness to neither have
purchased a wife nor stolen her.
Having her agree to have you steal her is the only way out in my world. It’s
the closest thing to actual love.
Zhou is so quiet and unassuming in character that I
naturally assumed he had just such a secret romance, a lover who wanted him to
take him for husband. Zhou is a romantic. I never
imagined he’d think to kidnap an innocent young girl. I was accordingly slow to
realise that the girl had not agreed. That in fact she had no idea that he was
even interested in her. I knew Zhou well enough to know that this was not him.
There was a time when he railed against wife-stealing as much as me.
I refused to help and I refused him angrily. I told him
savagely that he was mad and that I expected more of him. He is one year older
than me, I said, and should set a better example. At twenty-four he is nearing
the end of his prime as a potential husband. In five more years we will be
among the shabbier of the poor candidates and beyond that it’s just a slide to
old age and solitude. Time simply wore Zhou down. He had a destiny he could not
face and so decided to make himself another, at the cost of someone else’s.
And Zhou is not good with women. There are some men who
can have women swooning in their wake with a few well chosen syllables. I am
not like this, women seem to resist me with ease, but women find Zhou is even
easier. He passes among them unnoticed, invisible.
Zhou’s mouth is simply a traitor to his soul whenever
women blunder into his path. Every word which passes through his lips serves
only to make him look a greater fool. It is his gift. He has a colossal brain,
I have no doubt of that, but he is inept with women. We are all inept with women. Women are untouchable
in my world. It is hard to know how to speak to unmarried women when there is
such little opportunity.
Zhou did not even know his future bride’s name when he
started to plan the kidnap. I told him to find out her name first. I told him
that I would not agree to help him kidnap the girl until he spoke to her and
discovered her name. He agreed. I was delighted.
I hoped that once he went to the trouble to find out her
name he would begin to see how mad his plan was. He would open his mouth. Some
clumsy words would fall out. He would sense her indifference to him and would
return to me defeated. I knew Zhou well. He would not fool himself. If he spoke
to her and she gave no sign that he pleased her, he would not pursue her
further.
He went to her village and spoke to her. Her name was
Sing. He told her trippingly, heart pounding through his neck, that she had a
beautiful name and she smiled. With that one smile all my hopes were in ruins.
When Zhou returned to tell me of the meeting, his determination had grown
beyond my influence. I had unwittingly fed his need, not opened his mind.
Sing had smiled and dangling on that one smile was the
hope of a man’s whole future.
I made one last concerted effort to deter him. If I failed
in this last effort, then I determined that I would give him my full help. He
could not afford to fail. If he failed to kidnap her successfully and was
caught, or if she told the police, then he would certainly go to prison. If I
could not prevent him from trying, then my clear duty from a twenty year long
friendship was to prevent him from failing so badly that he went to gaol.
I got Zhou drunk on a bottle of my uncle’s best wine and
started from the beginning.
‘Women are different today Zhou.’
He nodded and took a drink.
‘The old traditions are dying. Some should die. Women are not cattle.’
He agreed. Both of us felt aggrieved that our lack of
wealth should place such a rude limit on our love.
‘I love her so much.’ he said hopelessly.
‘You’ve spoken with her once.’ I was mercilessly cold with him. Indifferent to his
suffering.
‘I’ve spoken with her a thousand times. She only spoke
with me once.’
‘It’s a selfish thing you’re doing.’
He looked at me very intensely. ‘I have one life. My
father is poor, I am so poor that I will never
have my choice of wife. Everyone in this whole world lives selfishly except for
little Zhou.’
‘That’s not true.’ I said childishly. ‘You can be very selfish.’
He smiled. ‘Either I do this now or I watch her pass by
forever, on the arm of some rich man. I will be sweeping a street behind them,
alone, pitying myself for never having tried this one thing.’
‘She’ll never agree.’
‘She might.’ She
did, after all, smile at him. I could see him telling himself. He sensed it was
too mad to be true, but he preferred to believe the madness. A smile. Perhaps
she smiled because it was her custom to be shy.
No, he couldn’t face the thought that he had embarrassed her with his words.
That she had been smiling at him from part mockery. Blushing at his
foolishness.
‘If she does marry you it will be from duty to her family
honour, not love for you.’
‘She might love
me. I must find out and this is the only way.’
‘There are other
ways.’ It was crap and he was quick to pounce on it.
‘There are no
other ways.’ And tragically he was right. If he loved her, he was without
options. He could never hope to marry
her legally. As soon as he asked her if she loved him, he’d be expected to
produce livestock. ‘She might love
me.’
And how could I tell the fool that she would never love him. She’d hate him. I should have said it there,
because it might have prevented the rest. I saw my friend’s agony. I disagreed
with everything he did. But his words echoed my father’s. Destinies don’t make themselves. I imagine that a lot of poor men steal wives for this reason. I
agreed to help Zhou on the condition that he never tell my mother or my sister
about my help. He agreed willingly, thinking it a small condition and one not
in need of explaining.
The next night we were to go to the next village and
kidnap Zhou’s unwitting wife. Zhou had borrowed an old, East German car from
his cousin who was rich. We were supposed to go to her village and follow her
home from the small factory where she worked. I would drive the car and Zhou
would do the kidnapping. We had planned to take her to the hills for a night.
We had packed some furs and a little food and water.
My first trouble came with the car. I had never driven
before and the first night we failed to get very far because I could not
control it. Zhou was not much better than me and didn’t know too much about
what I was doing wrong. He had promised his cousin that we would not take the
car too far, that we were learning to drive. It was another week before we
could borrow it again.
The second time I drove all the way to her village. It
took nearly an hour. By the end of it I was quite good at everything except
changing gears. Zhou was nervous, sitting in the long back seat beside a pile
of furs, chewing on the inside of his bottom lip. I felt rather calm. I knew my
part. I believed I had the easy job.
In the end it was all
easy.
We were going along and we saw her approaching. Zhou was
excited. He kept screaming ‘Stop the car, it’s her!’ She was early, she had to be because we were early. I stopped the car and Zhou got out, leaving his back
door open.
I didn’t watch him approach her. I hadn’t
even seen her face. I was too busy looking for people who might see us snatch
the girl. We were very lucky because it looked deserted.
Zhou told her that we had an injured dog in the car on the
back seat, asked her if she could help identify whose dog it was. I heard him
saying it. We’d rehearsed it so many times in our minds that even though his
voice was too faint to hear the words, the syllables were recognisable to me. I
looked in my wing mirror to see her body at the side of the car leaning in.
‘It’s under that coat.’ said Zhou, his body close to hers.
It was my sign to start the car.
As I started the car I looked in the rear view mirror to
see her face. I saw one hairy, rushing rectangular glimpse of it before she
disappeared from view and I heard her body slump across the back seat, Zhou’s
arms pushing her down. I scanned around nervously for onlookers as I heard the
back door slam and Zhou yelled out ‘Drive!’
I drove, grinding those gears in a frenzy. I was nervous
because she screamed from the moment we were moving. She was beyond reckoning
with, she simply screamed and screamed. Zhou kept cradling her, whispering
‘shush’ noises. He told her that we wouldn’t hurt her. He said we were saving
her from other bad men. The fool half believed every word he spoke. He figured
she was safer being kidnapped by him than by other men. She begged for us to
take her straight home.
I heard her voice trembling. I could not see her face, but
I was certain it was terrified. I felt horrible. It was the most shameful
moment of my life. Zhou caught me looking at him angrily in the rear view mirror.
I hated him for making me do this.
‘Drive.’ he muttered with a frown.
All the way to the hills which lie between her town and
ours she begged us to let her go. As dusk fell, she pleaded with us to let her
walk home. She swore she would not have us arrested. Zhou explained that he
couldn’t let her go. He finally admitted that he loved her.
She started screaming again immediately. Zhou didn’t take
it too well. We were in the hills. Miles from anywhere. He ordered me to stop
the car. I though he was going to let her go. I was about to suggest we drive
her back, but Zhou was not nearly ready to give up. He’d put so much hope into
this one act of insanity that he couldn’t
let it go at disaster. He needed devastation before he could accept what was
plain.
I stopped the car. He got out, telling me to guard his wife. I was so angry at him for barking
that utterly vile remark at me, as though I condoned him, as though I were his
lackey, that it took every ounce of my nerve to remain silent. I correctly
sensed that a third person going berserk was precisely what was not required.
I saw him disappear off into the dark wilderness for a
moment to confront his demons. Surrounded by the dark and with a confirmed
maniac outside the car, his bride saw her best chances in reasoning
with me. I hated Zhou all the more when she turned her formidable charm on me.
For the first time I got a good look at her. Underneath
her tear-stained face perched a vulnerable, hopeless quality which was designed to evoke a deep sympathy within
me. I saw it there, planted on her face like paint on top of rust, a hopeful
piece of bait, a lure designed to trap the unwary, hormonal man and rob him of
his twenty year loyalty. It made me angry at her. Everyone was trying to
manipulate me for their own selfishness. The more I picked her apart in my
mind, hated her for Zhou’s sake, the more I knew I was lost.
Something terrible happened. Something utterly horrible.
Something unexpected and yet with hindsight, something almost inevitable.
I fell in love with Sing. I fell in love with the
kidnapped bride of my best friend and I fell in love with her immediately the
moment our eyes met, the moment I tried to hate her I was equally powerless
against her. If Zhou’s crime was great, loving beyond his means, then mine was
ten thousand times greater. Loving beyond the bounds of friendship. Loving the
woman you’ve stolen for someone else.
‘Please, your friend cannot
marry me.’ she was almost sobbing as she spoke. Pleading with her voice, yet to
hold the hope that I would even listen.
She was still trying to wear me down, unaware that I had already become
defenceless.
‘I know.’ I said. It seemed to release a lot of her fear
to hear my certainty and calmness. ‘I begged him not to do this. I came along
to protect you both.’ She knew that
Zhou and myself could go to prison. She knew without needing to be told that I
cared for him but despised him. She sensed my loyalty to him was strong, knew
it was fragile.
‘Will you help me anyway?’
I had already decided that I would help her but I waited for a moment to
answer, my mind still grasping for a simple solution which would suit everyone,
like a man drowning in an ocean looking for a piece of driftwood he knows will
not come, I felt myself finally submitting to the ocean below. Realising that
there was no solution gave me the
freedom to drown.
‘Yes I’ll help. But we’ll wait for my friend to return and
we will tell him what we have decided.’ I remember how calm I was. Zhou was
still gone two minutes later. We sat in silence the whole time. My mind raced
for something to say.
‘What will you tell your parents.’
‘I will tell them the truth.’ she said
shocked by the thought that there were other serious options.
‘And?’
‘My father will expect me to marry him. He is very
traditional. My mother will be angry at me for it. She had hoped that I might
marry the son of my father’s boss. My grandmother will be pleased. She says I
am too ugly for men to be interested in me.’
The romantic in me heard only the heartache she must have
felt peeling away at her. I don’t know what made me do it, but I started the
car.
‘But you’re beautiful.’ I gushed. I felt needles prickle
my whole body. I was embarrassed. A married man may say this to his wife all he
likes, but it is the kind of thing a poor man such as myself confesses in
weakness. He lacks the wealth to back up his words.
At the sound of the car engine, Zhou came running from the
trees, white as a snowfall, angry and confused. Sing and I had locked him out
of the car. He bashed at it. He called me some names. I shouted at him that it
was a silly game now, that it was cold and we’d upset her too much. It had to
end. Zhou knew he’d lost her. He just couldn’t believe it. He screamed in rage
that he would kill us both before he’d let it end.
Zhou terrified Sing because she didn’t know he was full of
bluster. She was screaming again because he was kicking the car so hard and
swearing to acts of violence. I just drove off to stop her from feeling that
terror. I left my best friend in the hills with no food, no light and no
warmth, stealing his stolen bride away.
Half an hour is a long time when the longest you’ve ever
spoken to an unmarried woman is ten seconds. I drove very slowly back towards
her village. I can justify it how I like, but I know exactly why my foot kept falling off the accelerator and on to the
brake. I was as devious and cunning as Zhou. I hoped that this young girl would
cling to me in her fear and that my calmness would make her feel safe. I told
her that Zhou was no danger. She seemed unconvinced. I said that I would not let Zhou hurt her and that
pleased her more. I continued to tell her how much he loved her even as I tried to make her feel something for me. I
think that half hour lasted for at least
an hour and a half the way I drove.
I did everything I could to get her to
think of me as a suitor without ever overtly suggesting myself as a
possibility.
Under normal rules this would have been impossible. Everything I said would have made my
motives transparent. But rescuing her from Zhou meant that I could disguise my
heart in flowery words and spend this time with her without normal laws applying. At the same time I was her rescuer
and her abductor, her captor yet her captive also. She never once asked me to
drive any faster. I took that as a sign of encouragement. That she wanted
friendship before she faced her family. I was honoured that after kidnapping
her, she could trust me at all.
We stopped on her road. She would not let me park too near
her house for fear of discovery. She was in no hurry to go inside now that she
felt safe with me in Zhou’s cousin’s car. The rest of this night would continue to be a torment for her. She
would have to beg her father to not force her to marry Zhou and she expected to
fail. Her father had warned her that kidnapping meant marriage since he refused
to bear any shame for her follies.
She was young, only eighteen. She was so delicate and
frail that I admit I was astonished she had reached eighteen without being
taken before. I understood why Zhou had fallen in love and I understood why he
felt compelled to act quickly. Sing was in danger until she was married.
I pointed this out to her since it did my own case no harm
and it raised an important truth which I was burning to express. ‘Nothing is to
prevent this from happening again. You are very beautiful.’
That was the second time I’d told her she was beautiful.
The first time had been a risk. I had hoped that she might think I was making
her feel better. This second time it was a certain confession of deeper
feelings and so deeper motives. Even the fact that I had just saved her from my
best friend could not disguise the intent in this remark. She, to her credit,
seemed to have no thoughts for my feelings at all. Having just escaped
kidnapping, her mind was now bent on escaping the marriage which all but
certainly followed. Even though Zhou had failed to get her consent, her own
family would be shamed until the day of marriage to Zhou buried the matter.
‘I will be lucky to avoid a church this time. If I can avoid marrying Zhou, I can avoid them all.’
‘I should go.’ I said, when what I meant was, ‘I should
start this car and take you off to the hills myself.’
She looked hopeless. Started to cry.
‘I can’t go inside.’ she said. ‘Please can’t we wait here
a bit longer?’
It broke my heart but after another minute of sitting
there with her, I started the car and waited for her to get out. ‘You have to
go.’ I said. ‘Your family will be terrified.’
My mother would have been so proud of me. With the engine
running and with her lack of desire to leave the car I had overwhelming
thoughts of driving off with her. But I kept my foot firmly on the brake.
She got out of the back seat and closed the door. She was
nodding at me as I unwound the window to the frosty air and a chilling
farewell.
‘Thank you.’ she said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘My name is Yuri.’
She smiled as she said to me ‘You have nice eyes, Yuri.’
That smile. On that smile hung a thousand hopes of my own.
I knew her better than I knew girls I had grown up around. They were untouchable, for twenty years I could watch them growing,
flowering, but never talk to them.
For one night the rules had gone. Zhou had made them disappear. In that few
hours, without those rules, I fell in sensational love.
‘I hope to see you again.’ I said. We
both knew what I meant by that. I might as well have said ‘I’ll go and fetch
the goats.’
‘I hope to see you.’
I went to drive away before I wept. It was so tragic. She
had just told me that she loved me. It made a kind of sense. In the time that
I’d known her differently, she’d known me differently too. I supposed that she
knew me better than most men she’d have met. She’d been terrified and I had
kept her safe. I doubt any other potential suitor had done more than wish her a
good day while studying the floor with their eyes.
And then she said the words which made all the difference.
She took the risk which I would not,
possibly because she was left with so few options. She looked at her father’s
front door when she spoke.
She said ‘If only you’d
kidnapped me.’
Her eyes were searching as they flicked on to me to read a
reaction. She certainly didn’t mean it in any literal sense. If I’d kidnapped
her, she’d have feared and hated me just as certainly as she feared and hated
Zhou. It was precisely because I hadn’t
kidnapped her that she said it. I knew it, she knew it. She was asking me to
abduct her there and then. To her, it was either I kidnapped her now and
married her, or she married Zhou. It would simply not have occurred to her to
lie to her family and she lacked the will to continue to fight them her whole
life. The whole family’s honour would be stained until she married her
kidnapper. Even if she did fight them
and won, she would likely end up with a husband she knew no better than Zhou as
well as a deep family rift for the rest of her life, for which she would feel responsible. Her father
would hate her, her mother would defend her, her grandmother would call her
ugly again… And all because of the stupidity of one ancient tradition and the
madness of Zhou.
Her torment could only end one way. If she was going to
marry anyone, I was her best hope for happiness since I was probably the
closest thing she knew then to love. I had kidnapped her, protected her, helped
her, I had let her go. In one night we had lived a life.
Destinies don’t make themselves. I had no time to think. I
was terrified her family would see her on the street.
I unlocked the front passenger’s door. She walked around
the front of the car, the headlights making her skin seem ghostly pale against
the coal night. She climbed in. My foot was on the accelerator and we were
heading out of her village towards the hills again before her belt was buckled
and her door was shut.
I stole my beautiful wife twice. Once from her family and
once from my best friend. An hour and a half is a long time. In that time three
destinies can unwind and a man can find or lose a dream of hope.
It’s not the best dream anyone ever had
and maybe not the purest of love, being stained with kidnapping and betrayal of
a friend, but it’s more than I ever dared to believe in. It’s my whole life to
have a family and a woman who loves me. Who chose
me.
