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Story: Only One
Chapter: 2
Previous: [Pre] [1]
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2. Father and Son
My father was a man who strived for nothing but power, money and reputation even though he had all of it. We were a rich, influential family, ‘eminently respectable’, as one would have said, and enjoyed the status and privilege of upper class society. I guess it was a matter of ancestry. My father’s father had already been rich, and so had his father – I never really cared enough to find out about our lineage. But back in the days there was no other way to become rich: you had to be born rich. And well, they must have been: otherwise some great-grandfather of ours would have never been able to travel to The New World and actually manage settling there without facing ruin.
Whatever it was; in my eyes, my father gradually turned into a ridiculous and even more so hypocritical madman. He was a proud man, thoroughly corrupt, and a person who, by the sudden end of his life, didn’t have the slightest glimpse of respect for anyone – not even his own flesh and blood.
Even in the early days of my childhood my relationship to my father wasn’t the best one. He was strict and disciplinary and, while I was too much of a bold, adventurous child and could never take him seriously in my youth, he resented me for the fact that I have always had a mind of my own. The irony in that was that I am his eldest son. First born, entitled to inherit all of his wealth, estate, and, in a sense, reputation. – The former two, of course, with some regulations.
I suspect him to have been greedy and selfish from the beginning; moreover, he probably feared nothing more than mortality, and the fact that I would long outlive him. Ironically, he couldn’t have had the slightest idea of how long exactly that was going to be. What is even more ironic is the fact that I never intended to inherit anything from him but his good name, since I couldn’t relinquish that tie between us. I was certainly going to be successful on my own, without his supposed achievements and prosperities.
I had always been certain that my father was aware of that, and thus resented me even more. Consequently, I could go out of my way in order to impress him, but nothing was ever good enough for his judging eyes.
For all of our lives, my father’s sympathies had never been equally divided between me and my brother. My father had preferred him from the day he was born, and if it had only been for him to decide, he would have also put more effort into my brother’s upbringing, education and general wellbeing.
My mother, a kind and beautiful woman who unfortunately died in childbirth with our stillborn sister, had however made sure that there were going to be no other than emotional differences affecting our lives. She had loved both of us and had always comforted and encouraged me, but she had also known that she couldn’t change anything about my father’s aversion towards me.
As soon as she was dead, my younger brother enjoyed every privilege of a ‘first born’ that usually I would have been entitled to, but had never been granted. In my father’s eyes, my brother was worth the trust, pride and encouragement he had never had much time to invest in me. To our father, my brother was the good and preferable one – but none of this ever changed anything about the close bond between him and me.
We were brothers, but we also were each other’s closest friend and intimate. We were inseparable as children and bound together in games and playing tricks on our nurse. Our many adventures and boyish games always found a certain balance: if he was afraid of something, I would encourage him and if I was too bold about something, his natural calmness and caution would eventually hold me back before I was getting into serious trouble.
When growing up and exchanged playing with each other for conversations, we had each other’s full trust and loyalty.
As the older brother, I had always had a natural instinct to protect him and look after him, but despite my father’s pampering, my brother turned out quite a strong young man himself, even though probably a bit more restrained and precautious. He probably was a little softer than I was, with a strong mind though, but generally calmer and of rather controlled countenance. He was very considerate as well, so whenever our father and I were fighting about something, my brother would find a way to calm down the atmosphere. – A line in him that I hated, because it angered me when he spoke up for me. He and I, however, hardly ever fought about something, even though we both had strong opinions. Maybe all the differences between us gave us the balance we needed.
Knowing that he would be well off, I decided to leave him temporally, and willing enough to be as far away from my father as possible, I initially chose a military career when the opportunity appeared in the wake of the Civil War. This option seemed to serve my purposes as well as my abilities – and it also seemed to please my father for once. To say that he was proud of me would probably be too much, but it seemed like he felt like I had finally done something right.
In the beginning it was easy to follow the orders of a military disciplinarian who had actually achieved something and gave me the possibility to rise in rank. I was good at what I did, strong, and skilful, as well as popular amongst the comrades. However, I soon began to tire of the constant political talk, as well as of the drill and discipline that I felt restricted me in each point of my personality: I had never been made for following orders and being an instrument of a higher institution, and eventually started to hate that the commandants tried to infiltrate my attitude with ideas I neither shared nor approved of.
My father, patriotic to the core, almost forced me violently back into the army once he learned that I had deserted it. To him, I was a disgrace to our family’s honour, and our already shaken relationship broke down completely. When he had first had an aversion against me, he then started to truly hate me.
But again it was my brother who managed to negotiate peace between us, and even though our father would never forgive me, he at least accepted me under his roof.
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[Chapter 3]
fact fiction 