The Book of Ten

Decalogue: Fathers and Daughters

 Decalogue: fathers and daughters n in a movie everything can be tidy as a small apartment in Warsaw, the one where a father and his teenage daughter live together happily, so happily in fact she thinks she’s in love with him and forges a letter from her long-dead mother saying he’s not really her father. they should just do it, she says, taking off her shirt, showing him her girlish breasts, the tight, pink areolas of the nipples, and the audience can see the hunger in his eyes, and the sadness too, how he wants to bury his face there before he covers her with a shirt, refuses to break the Commandment. and of course, she’ll come clean eventually, admit she made the whole thing up. but i kept thinking about Lot and his daughters, a story in the bible that used to fill me with unease. in the distance Sodom burns, and in the cave the old man’s drunk, passed out, his wife having conveniently turned into a pillar of salt, while his daughters, believing he’s the last man left on earth, take their turns having sex with him. i wondered if it was really to ensure the race or to shame him for what he’d done in Sodom—hidden the angels from the mob and offered instead the daughters? Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only  unto these men do nothing. . . . the story has its own kind of tidiness, i suppose, but it left me confused the way my own father left me confused. by day he sat silently in his armchair, only to rise to the kitchen table where he shoveled a forkful of words back into his mouth like a film rewound and my mother wept at the sink. i pretended i was somewhere else and stared up at the silly wallpaper where deer in wedding veils leapt in rows endless as trees. it seemed so sad to be trapped there in the snowy forest without their grooms. Would i ever be a bride? Later, sent up to bed, i felt the dark reach out its bony fingers and i was afraid it would creep inside, the door to my body unlatched. When i cried, why didn’t my mother come? instead, my father lay down as if to comfort me, but there was no comfort in the way we lay on opposite sides of the bed as if we meant to keep a boat from tipping over, no comfort in the way we lay, not like spoons, but knives, turning our backs on each other. i didn’t know what it meant, that not-touching, but i knew enough to be ashamed. no Commandment was broken, but sometimes i couldn’t sleep. instead of counting sheep, i counted the deer, those brides lost in the cold without their mates. in what world could they come down from the wall and lie by the warm stove? ...