QUEST FOR THE TRUTH

The quest for the meaning of life became apparent in the times when the world was visibly defined by a plastic curtain hanging from the garage ceiling. On one side, there was my father building ships from matches and a train set made from tins with wiring cables, running on electricity. It even had little people sitting in the compartments and they were all looking towards the windows made from plastic foil. Dad was a self-proclaimed artist, spending hours in his garage, always cutting something, polishing metals, curving faces out of wood.

Outside of the garage, in his daytime job he policed the communities, and eventually became a sergeant, in times where the main offence was a political statement against the ruling bodies.

Meanwhile, my beautiful mum worked with numbers in a company owned by the government. She would come home after her full-time job, carrying bags with groceries, going straight to the kitchen to cook what she bought, repeating the same thing every day without complaining. Her personal dreams had been set aside and her sole focus was on the well-being of her large family. Listening to forbidden radio stations, she yearned for her children to live in a different world where they could take a flight with full wingspan. But what hope was there to get up the ladder into a brighter future if everyone stood in the same row of steps? Some had no dreams at all, and most created a vacuum of indifference around themselves. Everything was preordained for ordinary citizens; everybody ate the same dinner on Sundays and bowed their heads to a foreign flag with red eyes, watching and catching those who blinked first.

I don't know what happened to me when I saw the tanks passing through our town, but my grandmother, who was still alive at the time of the awakening, spoke about the end of the world. She firmly believed the devil collaborated with those at the top to enslave us to the mighty power, coming from the east with a hammer and a sickle.

The fear of what was coming transferred also into our home through the smoke down the chimney into our kitchen and down to the garage. There, in the room where my dad fed the fire with lumps of coal, he began accumulating illegal material for reading. If this came out, not only would he have lost his job, but they could also make him disappear, shame his children, and make his wife hate him.

Those were scary and exciting times. My parents argued daily, my three brothers fought between each other, my sister locked herself in with books, and I wanted to know the truth. Why, given only one chance at life, hostilities break up entire countries? Why build a tin train with tiny aluminium passengers without a driver in the locomotive? Did dad mean, perhaps, that one takes the power seat into his hands and steam through life in search of truth, risking the crash of the train on which his life rolls through?

It could be that my father's nonchalant attitude towards undertaking underground activities against the political system shaped my heart to write violent thrillers. Dark times created this author’s biography to search for the light switch when there was a heavy-duty curtain, dividing the world into the west and the east with miles of woodland in between.

Years later, when shackles fell from the annexed countries from the roaring bear, dad confessed that he was reading in his garage manuals about various firearms, given the fact that he had only one pistol with one round of ammunition allowed to carry for his work.

“Times were hard, and I wanted to be prepared,” he told me in his old age. “Sometimes the search for truth is worthy of firing a bullet.”

The impact of his comments resonated deeply within me, igniting a fervent fire that propelled me to write with emotional intensity. Amidst the outpouring of words in my stories, my devotion to justice remained steadfast because I understood that as a writer, I must always unveil the truth.

Post Views : 288