The Boxer |
Issue 14
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The Sunday-evening street blurred through reflections, movement, and unaided myopia. Habit kept him from missing his stop. His glasses were a short, acetate tie on his neck as he walked to his grandmother’s apartment, carrying grave news. He greeted her and leaned in to be kissed on the right cheek. Each year it seemed he had to lean further down, as his grandmother’s height diminished. Neither the twenty-seven-year-old grandson nor the seventy-four-year-old spoke beyond the greeting, as both took their seats at the table in the compact living room. Her silvery, corpulent cat was ignored. The grandson sat at the head of the table—bearer of bad news—perhaps the bad news itself. His grandmother was seated and cupped her soft face in a weathered hand. She regarded him as she would have had he been ten years old, freshly fallen, lightly scuffed, and seeking consolation.
“I, uh… we broke up. On Friday. I’m back at Mom’s place. And, yeah.” “Why? What happened?” Why indeed. He had not been able to admit to anyone who had not already known. He was not capable of the suicide inherent in it, nor the murder of the person they had seen him as. He took what breath he could. “We’ve had a rough month, realized we had a lot of issues, tried to work through them—" Because I’d had a three‑month digital affair with a divorced woman halfway across the world. “—and on Friday she concluded that she doesn’t want to keep trying and that, well,” his chin quivered, and he felt choked. He struggled to still himself and not cry openly. When was the last time his grandmother had seen him cry? He couldn’t recall. At the head of the table sat a ruin of a man seeking solace and a path forward without bringing down more of the world unto himself. He hoped no more questions would come, so no more lies would have to leave his mouth. The abrupt end of a nine‑year relationship attracts questions like nothing else. “So she just wanted to leave? Why?” “She just started an exciting new job and she found a new circle of friends. And I was her first boyfriend, and she felt like—” She couldn’t forgive or trust me and time wouldn’t heal any of it and she would always feel resentful, and I broke my image in her eyes and became unlovable. When the deluge of excuses ceased and the patchwork of lies settled, he had a moment to recover his breath in the silence of his grandmother working to synthesize his words into understanding and judgement. To her, he was still a faultless, bright boy. Beloved, quiet, handsome. Wronged and left. “But what issues did you have? You never complained about anything.” “I was just—I think I’ve been depressed this past year. Since we moved in together. I noticed how little she seemed to care about who I am, how disinterested she was, and it was hard to bear it daily. She noticed my state and it depressed her and--” So I went roaming through the computer screen and found someone who cared the way I wanted to be cared about. “That’s not right. It’s not good to keep things inside. You were partners. And if that’s what you were going through, then it’s for the best that it’s over. Then this had to happen. God course-corrects us. She just wasn’t meant for you and something else is. I could always tell she wasn’t too present. Whenever you two visited, or when I visited you, and then you stopped visiting me altogether,” He sat, shoulders slumped, eyes fixed on an indeterminate spot on the table. He tried to make his grandmother’s words fit into him somehow. Did they make sense, even in the shadow of what had truly happened? They did, somehow. “When I was with your grandfather,” Grandfather—the man whose very name was struck through and little mentioned. All he’d known of a grandfather he’d only seen twice in his life, was that the man was a boxer, and that he’d left grandmother for some undisclosed reason. His father’s seething, never-elucidated hatred for the man simmered below the surface whenever the man was mentioned. A coal of ashen anger glowed inside him; it led to abandoning his father’s surname. Though they still told him, when he took up the masculine sport in his teenage years: your grandfather was a boxer! And the taking of the mantle was a point of pride, and the invocation of a distant grandfather as a boxer was one too. “He always had so little patience for me. We barely spoke. He used to come back from work exhausted and mean, and it would always be a disaster if I interrupted his rest.” For a moment, he forgot his own pain as family history unfolded—one he had never heard before, and about so mysterious a character. “One day he came back home from work in a bad mood and sat down on the couch in our living room. He was reading some book while I cleaned, and I accidentally brushed past him and moved his book. He beat me. He had no patience, and he thought I interrupted him on purpose. So, he used to beat me. And I used to blame myself for being clumsy and for disturbing him.” Her tone was steady, composed. She spoke of the previously untold episode with frustration, but the emotion there was far from raw. He wondered whether the family simply forgot to let him know, as the story clicked and reframed a lifetime. He listened. “He was jealous. Always so jealous. He would always suspect me and question me about where I’ve been. There was a man who was a dear friend of mine, and a colleague on another occasion. They were really just friends. Nothing happened. And nosy neighbours only made it all worse. Poisoned him against me. And then one day I couldn’t take any of it anymore and I took your father and your uncle, and I left him.” “Nobody ever told me. I didn’t know.” Regret washed over him for ever having met the man, though it happened innocently on a trip to Moscow to visit aunts and celebrate a 14th birthday. And he remembered the grey, diminutive man—spry, energetic, a head shorter than everyone else in his advanced age. The grandfather’s unprompted, muddy excuses for why he hadn’t been in touch. And above all he remembered how his father looked out at him from the grandfather’s older features. That distant man and the direct blood that tied them. “Well, it’s not a nice story and your father doesn’t like to mention him.” “How old was he when it happened?” “Oh, he was maybe five, and your uncle was only a baby then. I’m telling you this to show that sometimes things are meant to end. And whatever is written for you is not with her.” “I understand. It’s just—” to speak simple truths hurts like nothing else, “It’s just difficult.” He sipped at the tall glass of water she offered and kept the same static view of a modest living room, of the various signs of his grandmother’s profession as a seamstress. And as he drank, she rummaged somewhere in her bedroom and returned with a single yellowed photo. “I think this is the only one I have left of him.” In the photo stood a group that seemed to be largely unaware of a lens. Though he’d never seen the grandfather in his youth, he immediately recognized the load-bearing man in the photo whose features he and his father bore. Curly hair, prominent ears, a stern, handsome face—the young father held a toddler whose face was hidden in the man’s chest. His father-to-be. Everyone in the photo, aside from the toddler and his father, had their eyes cast downwards, though the subject of their collective gaze was outside the borders of the snapshot. “This was taken at my father’s funeral. We were still together when he passed away. After I left your grandfather, I tore up every photo I had of him. I think I missed this one. Maybe I shouldn’t have torn them up.” Suddenly, he couldn’t remember whether the man in the photo still lived. And after another moment, he recalled the faint news of his death, and how little anyone seemed to care. Next, he recalled the last time he’d seen the man, sometime in his later teens at a large family gathering the details of which he could barely make out. His grandfather had flown in from Moscow. “I just remembered seeing him when he was here. How did you feel about it then?” His grandmother’s eyes replayed scenes from that gathering. “A lot of time passed since what happened, and when he was here, well. I didn’t feel as strongly about it all. What do you remember?” “Barely anything. I remember seeing him talking to family members. There were a lot of people, so I can’t remember anything specific.” “Well, I didn’t know if I even wanted your father to take me to that dinner, and your father didn’t want to go there himself. And then I decided that to not come would be too rude, and my mother urged us to go. When your grandfather saw me there, he approached and immediately dropped to his knees. He begged for forgiveness. He was so thin—I think his cancer was advanced at that stage—and he just kept begging me for forgiveness. I told him that I forgive him and that was that. He then kneeled before my mother and begged her for forgiveness as well.” “You felt like you could? Forgive him, I mean.” “Yes, what else would I have done? To hold onto that anger my entire life? I just felt bad for him.” She spoke with resignation, and the images that replayed in her mind seemed to fade. The grandson was brought back into view, sitting there, fighting the persistent urge to cry. “I can’t remember any of that.” “I think it happened before you arrived.” The grandfather’s lone photograph lay between them, as he lay somewhere far away. And for a moment, his stern eyes seemed to look straight through the lens—and through him. Condemned, dead man—laid bare, forgiven, preserved in the perishable matter of a photo. His grandson’s thoughts shot back to the night of the breakup, to the cold words he delivered to his broken beloved. I want you to delete every single photo of me. Everything. Nothing. Nothing. And I will do the same. Once the matter of the old boxer was settled, his grandmother continued to console and assure the young one until he’d regained enough composure, at least enough to be able to make his way back home. He gave the silent cat a quick scratch behind the ear, then rose to stand by the door. “Well. I’ll go to the bus now. Thank you. I… Thank you.” And before tears could gather and break surface tension, he leaned in once again and held his short grandmother. He felt her golden hands on his shoulders as she kissed him goodbye. “It’s for the best. It will be difficult, but remember that someone else is meant for you.” He thanked her with his weak voice, promised to return, and was back out in the unremarkable street. What is to be done with these hands, this heart—its deeds and its shards? He, bearing both his father’s and grandfather’s features, vanished in the mundane tangle of streets. |
Alexei Raymond is a writer whose work explores post-Soviet diasporic lives, moments of threshold, and fractured identities. Originally from the Middle East, he is currently based in Belgrade. His stories appear in The Bloomin’ Onion, Lowlife Lit Press, and The Crawfish, with forthcoming work in Blood+Honey, Waffle Fried, and The Argyle Literary Magazine.
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