Lesson 1 How Others See Me

―Oh, no!‖ I said quickly. ―I shall return him when the owner comes to claim him.‖
―All right,‖ he said, ―I hope that dog makes a hunter out of you.‖
Biryuk and I became fast friends. Every afternoon after school we went to the field to chase quails
or to the bank of the river which was fenced by tall, blade-sharp reeds to flush snipes. Father was away
most of the time but when he was home he hunted with us.
Biryuk scampered off and my sister flung the stick at him. Then she turned about and she saw
me.
―Eddie, come here,‖ she commanded. I approached with apprehension. Slowly, almost carefully,
she reached over and twisted my ear.
―I don‘t want to see that dog again in the house,‖ she said coldly. ―That dog destroyed my slippers
again. I‘ll tell Berto to kill that dog if I see it around again.‖ She clutched one side of my face with her hot,
moist hand and shoved me, roughly. I tumbled to the ground. But I did not cry or protest. I had passed
that phase. Now, every word and gesture she hurled at me I caught and fed to my growing and restless
hate.
My sister was the meanest creature I knew. She was eight when I was born, the day my mother
died. Although we continued to live in the same house, she had gone, it seemed, to another country from
where she looked at me with increasing annoyance and contempt.
One of my first solid memories was of standing before a grass hut. Its dirt floor was covered with
white banana stalks, and there was a small box filled with crushed and dismembered flowers in one
corner. A doll was cradled in the box. It was my sister‘s playhouse and I remembered she told me to keep
out of it. She was not around so I went in. The fresh banana hides were cold under my feet. The interior
of the hut was rife with the sour smell of damp dead grass. Against the flowers, the doll looked incredibly
heavy. I picked it up. It was slight but it had hard, unflexing limbs. I tried to bend one of the legs and it
snapped. I stared with horror at the hollow tube that was the leg of the doll. Then I saw my sister coming.
I hid the leg under one of the banana pelts. She was running and I knew she was furious. The walls of the
hut suddenly constricted me. I felt sick with a nameless pain. My sister snatched the doll from me and
when she saw the torn leg she gasped. She pushed me hard and I crashed against the wall of the hut.
The flimsy wall collapsed over me. I heard my sister screaming; she denounced me in a high, wild voice
and my body ached with fear. She seized one of the saplings that held up the hut and hit me again and
again until the flesh of my back and thighs sang with pain. Then suddenly my sister moaned; she
stiffened, the sapling fell from her hand and quietly, as though a sling were lowering her, she sank to the
ground. Her eyes were wild as scud and on the edges of her lips, drawn tight over her teeth, quivered a
wide lace of froth. I ran to the house yelling for Father.
She came back from the hospital in the city, pale and quiet and mean, drained, it seemed, of all
emotions, she moved and acted with the keen, perversity and deceptive dullness of a sheathed knife,
concealing in her body that awful power for inspiring fear and pain and hate, not always with its drawn
blade but only with its fearful shape, defined by the sheath as her meanness was defined by her body.
Nothing I did ever pleased her. She destroyed willfully anything I liked. At first, I took it as a
process of adaptation, a step of adjustment; I snatched and crushed every seed of anger she planted in
me, but later on I realized that it had become a habit with her. I did not say anything when she told Berto
to kill my monkey because it snickered at her one morning, while she was brushing her teeth. I did not
say anything when she told Father that she did not like my pigeon house because it stank and I had to
give away my pigeons and Berto had to chop the house into kindling wood. I learned how to hold myself
because I knew we had to put up with her whims to keep her calm and quiet. But when she dumped my
butterflies into a waste can and burned them in the backyard, I realized that she was spiting me.
My butterflies never snickered at her and they did not smell. I kept them in an unused cabinet in
the living room and unless she opened the drawers, they were out of her sight. And she knew too that my
butterfly collection had grown with me. But when I arrived home, one afternoon, from school, I found my
butterflies in a can, burned in their cotton beds like deckle. I wept and Father had to call my sister for an
explanation. She stood straight and calm before Father but my tear-logged eyes saw only her harsh and
arrogant silhouette. She looked at me curiously but she did not say anything and Father began gently to
question her. She listened politely and when Father had stopped talking, she said without rush, heat or
concern: ―They were attracting ants.‖
I ran after Biryuk. He had fled to the brambles. I ran after him, bugling his name. I found him
under a low, shriveled bush. I called him and he only whimpered. Then I saw that one of his eyes was
bleeding. I sat on the ground and looked closer. The eye had been pierced. The stick of my sister had
Grade 7 English Learning Package 3