Florian Albrod
My Uncle's Shadow
I vividly remember the first time my uncle came to visit us because it inspired me to draw a picture. I was four years old then, and I had probably seen my uncle before, but his visit is still the earliest memory I have of him. I had been sitting on the carpet of our hallway playing with a set of plastic knights when my parents had answered the doorbell and my uncle’s shadow fell upon me. He had been standing on our front porch in his dark raincoat, and when he noticed me down there on the floor, he grinned at me and politely lifted his top hat. For some inexplicable reason, this had terrified me, and I had fled to my room where I later drew the picture in crayons. It showed my uncle towering above me at the door, a dark phantom in Victorian attire, with glowing red eyes like saucers and a grin full of fangs like saw teeth.
Over the years, my childish terror of my uncle subsided, and the picture, which I had kept like I keep everything I create, took on a different aspect to my eyes. I have always been bad at portraying evil. It is as if I had a circuit breaker within me that interferes whenever I try to draw something terrifying, or write a story in which bad things happen, so that they always gain some redeeming quality. I draw and write a lot, by the way, and I’m not sure if this is why I don’t make friends at school or if it is the other way round, Chicken or the egg. My uncle’s Cheshire cat-grin, anyway, had turned out quite friendly in retrospective, and everyone who saw my painting, including my parents, thought that the figure looked somewhat cute.
Of course, my uncle really had nothing cute about him, and when he moved in with us one summer, he was in a bad place. It was in July of 2050, shortly after the ban on meat, and my uncle felt like an outcast. “It is a strange feeling," he told us over our dinner of vegetable Bolognese. “I could have the most accomplished vegetarian meal and still feel unsatisfied, because there remains a primeval itch within me that I cannot scratch. With all due respect for your spaghetti, Ellie, it is delicious," he added when he saw my mother’s expression. “So, tell me, Casper, how is school these days?”
This was addressed at me. I was fifteen that summer, and as I said, I didn’t really have any friends and was looking forward to a time when social merit wouldn’t be measured in one’s P.E. grade or the amount of alcohol one could consume. I told my uncle that everybody else was completely superficial and that I liked Literature and Art Class. This found my uncle’s approval. “But don’t get your hopes up too high," he said. “Back when I became a scholar, I thought that the humanities were a safe haven for intellectuals like you and me” - I liked that - “but they, too, are a shark pool. Rather than being unified by common values and interests, whenever professors meet, everyone tries to prove to their colleagues that they are actually the smartest person in the room.”
My uncle, being a professor of theology, was, of course, no stranger to this kind of thinking, as he usually was the most intelligent person in the room. “Scholars can be so full of themselves, sometimes," he continued, “and it’s especially bad with theologians, because they truly believe that their opinions matter within a greater – the greatest! – scheme of things. Imagine that you could trace back your intellectual heritage; you might take a look at a photo of your late doctoral advisor in the digital yearbook, just as he was engaged in scholarly debate under a framed color photo of his own doctoral advisor, who in turn kept a black and white picture of his advisor in a photo album, and so on, until you get to Calvin and establishing a reign of terror in Geneva doesn’t seem all that wrong anymore.”
I had no idea who Calvin was, back then, but I understood that my uncle had recently suffered from a perceived reign of terror himself as someone had vandalized his house. This had something to do with the ban on meat, which seemed as absurd to me as it seemed overdue, because I had never eaten an animal in my life and knew no one who still desired to do so. No one, except my uncle, that is, who was old-fashioned in these things and had held a lecture about the idea of dominium terrae and man’s reign over the animal kingdom at university. He later showed me some of his scripts, and it was a fascinating lecture, even though I didn’t understand everything; assessing, free of polemics, but full of interesting and unconventional thoughts and ideas. The student body had obviously taken no liking to his musings, however, as they first demanded my uncle’s release from duties and later stalked him at his home. My uncle, bachelor by choice, had just been in his small kitchen, preparing a Turducken, some disgusting recipe he had found on YouTube for which you have to stuff a turkey with a duck that has in turn been stuffed with a chicken, when the first brick had smashed his window.
“It was supposed to be my farewell to meat," my uncle had told us, “a final feast that I would overgorge on so as to never feel the desire to eat meat again," but as more bricks came flying and someone painted the word MURDERER! in red spray paint on his wall, he decided to take an indefinite leave. Defiantly, he had taken the half-frozen Turducken with him, and the abomination had ridden shotgun with him until it got too warm, and my uncle dropped it in a ditch off some country road.
My parents, worried for my uncle’s safety, had allowed him to stay with us over the rest of the summer until his house had been renovated and the waters had smoothed again, and he had set up camp in our guestroom. The first thing he did was order a cast bust of German philosopher Immanuel Kant on the internet that he could put on his desk. “I have one back at home and another one in my office at university," he had told us. “Under Kant’s stern gaze, I am reminded of the dignity that is inherent in human nature and that it is our moral obligation to put our mind above our desires.”
My mother grinned at this. “I remember the first one you had when you were sixteen. You had a girl over from orchestra, and she was impressed because she mistook it for Mozart.”
One evening, my father, who was a local politician and had a very rational way of thinking, sat down with my uncle and had his brother-in-law try to explain to him Kant’s derivation of human dignity. “I feel like the term dignity gets dropped in every other debate, but I’d like to have a clearer understanding of its philosophical meaning," he said, pouring himself a glass of wine.
And so, my uncle had explained to us in laymen terms how Kant had constructed the idea of human dignity; that man was living in a duality of worlds and had to conquer his desires by means of his mind, becoming an acting subject of morality by freely subjugating himself to what is right. If morality originated in the mind of man, our uncle explained, man can be morally subdued only by subduing himself, never through others.
“And is this exclusive to humans?” my father had asked. “What about animals?”
“It is exclusive to every rational being. Kant noticeably includes God and aliens in his theory. But to my mind, animals are no rational beings, so no, I do not believe they have an inherent dignity.”
“So you are allowed to stuff a chicken into a duck and the duck into a turkey," I had interfered.
“You are," my uncle had said. “But only because animals have no dignity of their own, you should not automatically treat them without dignity. Man is a creature capable of imagination, and sometimes it is the right thing to do to imagine dignity where there is none and project it on those who do not possess it of their own.”
As someone who caught every mosquito with a glass and set it outside instead of swatting it, I appreciated this thought, although I was still unsure how the Turducken fit into my uncle’s concept. The new law, anyway, put quite some strain on my uncle’s imagination. Society had basically decided for him that from now on, he should always imagine an animal to have dignity, whether he wanted to or not. “Only because they made it illegal," my uncle had grumbled, they being just about everyone I knew except him, “it doesn’t become immoral." But in the end, he had adapted to the new situation quite pragmatically. “There is a morality in upholding the law, after all," he had said, and despite the desires that tortured him, he had joined our vegetarian meals.
***
After dinner, I went outside to feed Regina. Regina was the single hen that we owned. Back when my parents had bought the house from its previous tenant, an old man who had decided to move to a retirement home, we had inherited the small shed of chickens belonging to the house and had enjoyed fresh eggs for breakfast until all of the chickens had died from old age. By now, Regina was the only one left and had only been named after all her companions were gone. This had amused my uncle, who quoted something by Schopenhauer about animals lacking individuality and observed that it had taken the death of everybody else for Regina to gain an identity. As I said, my uncle was in a bad place that summer.
Regina had originally been named T-Regina, the female version of T-Rex, because I had read somewhere on the internet that chickens had evolved from dinosaurs, but the name had quickly devolved to its current form. These days, Regina was ancient and didn’t lay any more eggs. We guessed her to be at least thirteen years old. Over time, my mother, who owned a small store for sports equipment, had brought home a colorful assortment of discarded golf balls Regina could sit upon, trying to hatch them. When Regina saw me approach with the bag of seeds, she laboriously got up from the ground of the shed where she was perched and waddled towards me, her ruffled gray feathers a sad contrast to her neon-painted fake eggs. I was watching her pecking at the fodder when I suddenly heard my uncle’s voice behind me. I was startled because I hadn’t noticed him follow me outside. “To be the last one of one’s kind," he said, watching Regina, “and yet be so content.” Regina paused to meet his gaze, and I don’t know why, but from this day on, I checked in on Regina more often than I usually did.
One evening, as I was coming back from the shed in the dark, there was a body lying on our front porch. Or so I thought, because when I came closer, with bated breath, I saw that it was a homeless man who had decided to spend the night on our property. The man was of indefinite age, gaunt and bearded, and lay snoring amidst a pile of plastic bags filled to the brim with trash. I didn’t know how to feel about him. On the one hand, I was kind of shocked by his intrusion. One’s home should be one’s safe place, and to see it violated by a stranger in such an intimate way somehow felt wrong to me. On the other hand, it was exactly the intimacy of the situation that had me tiptoe back to the door so as to not disturb the poor man in his sleep.
I let myself in quietly and was startled once again as my uncle was standing motionless in the dark behind the window, looking outside like a vampire in contemplation of his castle.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
My uncle turned towards me. “I heard you leave the house and was watching you in case something happened. Have you noticed the drifter?”
“How long has he been there?”
“Oh, he arrived some two hours ago. You actually went by him without noticing him when you went for the shed.”
“You could have said something.”
“Don’t worry," my uncle said. “I would have interfered if there had been any danger to you.”
“Do you think I should wake mom and dad?” I asked him. “Or maybe call the police? I mean, this could be considered trespassing, couldn’t it?”
My uncle nodded. “It definitely could, and I see that this is disturbing you. But if I were to give you advice as a theologian, it would be this: Before you act, imagine yourself to be a character in a biblical parable. Now, how will this parable go? A wealthy family found a beggar peacefully sleeping in front of their door. When the son of the family beheld this, he was very frightened, and in his anger, he called for the watch who removed the man. Or will it rather be: When the son of the family beheld this, he was stricken with compassion, and he tiptoed back to his door so as to not wake the man?”
I turned red in the dark, because my uncle, watching me from the window, had obviously seen right through me.
“Nonetheless," my uncle continued, “I think that we should get the chicken. Regina might not be safe out there.”
This hadn’t occurred to me yet. “Do you think he might kill her?” I asked.
“Hunger can be stronger than morals," my uncle answered. “Do you want me to get her?”
I hesitated. “It’s all right. I will get Regina," I said. “Will you watch out for me?”
“Of course,” my uncle said, once again taking up his watch at the window.
I snuck back to the shed, careful not to wake the man sleeping on our porch, and picked up Regina. The hen was dozing and felt surprisingly light as I clutched her to my chest. My uncle opened the door for us, and when I got inside, I felt like danger had been averted. Regina was still sleeping; she was hard to wake these days and would have been easy prey. I was, however, somewhat clueless as to what to do with her now, as my parents had never allowed animals inside our house.
My uncle, again seemingly able to read my mind, offered to let the hen sleep with him in his guest room. “I could make a nest for her from some of my old essays," he said. But I declined politely and took Regina back to my room, where I sat her on a spare pillow.
You’d imagine that owning a pet chicken should make you somewhat popular at school, or at least interesting, but it was that time when everyone of my classmates was more interested in chicks than in chickens, and besides, Regina should have hatched a football instead of some bourgeois golf balls, anyway. I didn’t care for team sports at all. The only sport I liked was going to the swimming hall late at night, when they turned on their colorful mood lighting and you had the swim lane all for yourself. My mother deserves eternal credit for always accepting my lack of sportiness despite her owning the sports store. She may have made a joke about it here and there, but all in all, she lacked that Mr. Hyde personality that surfaces in most people when they think you are holding the racket wrong.
Alas, the same couldn’t be said about my classmates, and so I often had no one to talk to. When I told my uncle this, he surprised me with a handwritten voucher that would allow me to strike up a conversation with him about whichever topic I liked, whenever I liked. It was one of the most thoughtful presents I’d ever received, and I was very moved. I decided to redeem my coupon one day during an excruciatingly boring dinner that was attended by some of my father’s fellow politicians.
“As a theologian," I asked him, “how do you feel about an afterlife?”
“First”, my uncle said, “I’d be interested as to why you’re asking this now.”
“We had a discussion in school about it, and when our teacher asked us, I couldn’t decide between three different answers. I felt like the most honest answer was that we cannot know if there is an afterlife and that it is pointless to speculate about it. But then, I can imagine an afterlife and hope that it exists. On the other hand, when we die and our brains stop working, we probably just fade away.” I felt quite edgy when I said the latter.
“As a theologian," my uncle said, “I don’t have much to add. You seem to have already covered quite a spectrum of opinions with your three answers. But I believe that the most important thing you said was that part about imagining an afterlife. The way I see it, the question if there is a life after death, if it exists in itself, is not even that relevant. What’s more important is that we can create an afterlife for ourselves--and others--by imagining it.”
I wasn’t sure I understood this, so my uncle kept explaining: “Remember what I said about dignity, and that even if someone doesn’t possess some inherent dignity, we can still grant it to them by projecting it onto them by way of our imagination? I think it might be the same with an afterlife. As a theologian, I am constantly asked by grieving relatives if I believe in paradise, as if what I believe were an objective truth that they could cling to. But my answer is always the same: What I believe doesn’t matter, only what they believe themselves. If they believe that there is an afterlife for their loved ones, then there will be one. They create it by believing in it.”
“So say that Regina dies of old age one day," I said, “I could create an afterlife for her as well?”
“Definitely," my uncle said. “By the way, I always proposed this as a means for the ethical consumption of animals. We could eat meat in a conscious way by simultaneously granting the animals their dignity.”
I was quite alarmed by this. “But then you could also be doing something evil and simply use your imagination to give it a veneer of good!”
“I suppose you could," my uncle nodded, “imagination is a two-faced sword.” And he cast a regretful glance at his vegetable stir fry.
***
A few weeks later, when I went to the shed, Regina was dead.
The hen was lying on her back, her clawed feet protruding up in the air amidst her golf balls like a murderer’s hands from a swamp. To an outside observer, the image might have had something grotesquely funny about it, but I was relieved to discover that Regina had indeed died of old age. She looked as peaceful as a chicken could look, and I knew that she’d had a remarkably long and comfortable life with us. I didn’t feel like crying--I was fifteen, and crying seemed inappropriate--but I was quite sad when I went back to the house and told my family about my discovery.
Apparently, there were pretty strict rules on how to dispose of a dead animal. We should have called some veterinarian agency who would have collected Regina to cremate her, but my father saw my sadness and, with uncharacteristic irrationality, proposed that we should bury her.
That afternoon, we gathered in our yard, and my father dug a hole with a shovel. I was once again surprised by my uncle, who had donned his academic gown and looked like a pastor. He had retreated to his guestroom after I had found Regina dead, and when he came out of his study, he had written a small sermon, about one and a half pages, for our chicken. “To help your imagination," he stated.
And so, we said our words of farewell to Regina, my father shoveled some earth onto her dead body, my mother actually did cry a bit, and I was so enraptured with my uncle’s sermon that I didn’t even hear his stomach growl.
***
The summer went by, and in October, some workmen called and said that my uncle’s house was habitable again and that the new security system had been installed. The students who had attacked my uncle were featured in the students’ magazine and lauded for their civil courage, but my uncle’s lectures for the winter semester would take place as planned, and the scandal was soon forgotten.
We waved my uncle goodbye when he moved back to his town, my parents silently relieved that after two months, they for once didn’t have to host anyone, and me somewhat disappointed that life would return to a boring normal again. It’s much more exciting when my uncle is here, and I am always looking forward to his visits these days. In the end, I believe that my uncle may at once be one of the most moral and one of the most lonely people that I know--one thing probably comes with the other--even though I will never be able to shake the feeling that he regards the world with a dark hunger.
Over the years, my childish terror of my uncle subsided, and the picture, which I had kept like I keep everything I create, took on a different aspect to my eyes. I have always been bad at portraying evil. It is as if I had a circuit breaker within me that interferes whenever I try to draw something terrifying, or write a story in which bad things happen, so that they always gain some redeeming quality. I draw and write a lot, by the way, and I’m not sure if this is why I don’t make friends at school or if it is the other way round, Chicken or the egg. My uncle’s Cheshire cat-grin, anyway, had turned out quite friendly in retrospective, and everyone who saw my painting, including my parents, thought that the figure looked somewhat cute.
Of course, my uncle really had nothing cute about him, and when he moved in with us one summer, he was in a bad place. It was in July of 2050, shortly after the ban on meat, and my uncle felt like an outcast. “It is a strange feeling," he told us over our dinner of vegetable Bolognese. “I could have the most accomplished vegetarian meal and still feel unsatisfied, because there remains a primeval itch within me that I cannot scratch. With all due respect for your spaghetti, Ellie, it is delicious," he added when he saw my mother’s expression. “So, tell me, Casper, how is school these days?”
This was addressed at me. I was fifteen that summer, and as I said, I didn’t really have any friends and was looking forward to a time when social merit wouldn’t be measured in one’s P.E. grade or the amount of alcohol one could consume. I told my uncle that everybody else was completely superficial and that I liked Literature and Art Class. This found my uncle’s approval. “But don’t get your hopes up too high," he said. “Back when I became a scholar, I thought that the humanities were a safe haven for intellectuals like you and me” - I liked that - “but they, too, are a shark pool. Rather than being unified by common values and interests, whenever professors meet, everyone tries to prove to their colleagues that they are actually the smartest person in the room.”
My uncle, being a professor of theology, was, of course, no stranger to this kind of thinking, as he usually was the most intelligent person in the room. “Scholars can be so full of themselves, sometimes," he continued, “and it’s especially bad with theologians, because they truly believe that their opinions matter within a greater – the greatest! – scheme of things. Imagine that you could trace back your intellectual heritage; you might take a look at a photo of your late doctoral advisor in the digital yearbook, just as he was engaged in scholarly debate under a framed color photo of his own doctoral advisor, who in turn kept a black and white picture of his advisor in a photo album, and so on, until you get to Calvin and establishing a reign of terror in Geneva doesn’t seem all that wrong anymore.”
I had no idea who Calvin was, back then, but I understood that my uncle had recently suffered from a perceived reign of terror himself as someone had vandalized his house. This had something to do with the ban on meat, which seemed as absurd to me as it seemed overdue, because I had never eaten an animal in my life and knew no one who still desired to do so. No one, except my uncle, that is, who was old-fashioned in these things and had held a lecture about the idea of dominium terrae and man’s reign over the animal kingdom at university. He later showed me some of his scripts, and it was a fascinating lecture, even though I didn’t understand everything; assessing, free of polemics, but full of interesting and unconventional thoughts and ideas. The student body had obviously taken no liking to his musings, however, as they first demanded my uncle’s release from duties and later stalked him at his home. My uncle, bachelor by choice, had just been in his small kitchen, preparing a Turducken, some disgusting recipe he had found on YouTube for which you have to stuff a turkey with a duck that has in turn been stuffed with a chicken, when the first brick had smashed his window.
“It was supposed to be my farewell to meat," my uncle had told us, “a final feast that I would overgorge on so as to never feel the desire to eat meat again," but as more bricks came flying and someone painted the word MURDERER! in red spray paint on his wall, he decided to take an indefinite leave. Defiantly, he had taken the half-frozen Turducken with him, and the abomination had ridden shotgun with him until it got too warm, and my uncle dropped it in a ditch off some country road.
My parents, worried for my uncle’s safety, had allowed him to stay with us over the rest of the summer until his house had been renovated and the waters had smoothed again, and he had set up camp in our guestroom. The first thing he did was order a cast bust of German philosopher Immanuel Kant on the internet that he could put on his desk. “I have one back at home and another one in my office at university," he had told us. “Under Kant’s stern gaze, I am reminded of the dignity that is inherent in human nature and that it is our moral obligation to put our mind above our desires.”
My mother grinned at this. “I remember the first one you had when you were sixteen. You had a girl over from orchestra, and she was impressed because she mistook it for Mozart.”
One evening, my father, who was a local politician and had a very rational way of thinking, sat down with my uncle and had his brother-in-law try to explain to him Kant’s derivation of human dignity. “I feel like the term dignity gets dropped in every other debate, but I’d like to have a clearer understanding of its philosophical meaning," he said, pouring himself a glass of wine.
And so, my uncle had explained to us in laymen terms how Kant had constructed the idea of human dignity; that man was living in a duality of worlds and had to conquer his desires by means of his mind, becoming an acting subject of morality by freely subjugating himself to what is right. If morality originated in the mind of man, our uncle explained, man can be morally subdued only by subduing himself, never through others.
“And is this exclusive to humans?” my father had asked. “What about animals?”
“It is exclusive to every rational being. Kant noticeably includes God and aliens in his theory. But to my mind, animals are no rational beings, so no, I do not believe they have an inherent dignity.”
“So you are allowed to stuff a chicken into a duck and the duck into a turkey," I had interfered.
“You are," my uncle had said. “But only because animals have no dignity of their own, you should not automatically treat them without dignity. Man is a creature capable of imagination, and sometimes it is the right thing to do to imagine dignity where there is none and project it on those who do not possess it of their own.”
As someone who caught every mosquito with a glass and set it outside instead of swatting it, I appreciated this thought, although I was still unsure how the Turducken fit into my uncle’s concept. The new law, anyway, put quite some strain on my uncle’s imagination. Society had basically decided for him that from now on, he should always imagine an animal to have dignity, whether he wanted to or not. “Only because they made it illegal," my uncle had grumbled, they being just about everyone I knew except him, “it doesn’t become immoral." But in the end, he had adapted to the new situation quite pragmatically. “There is a morality in upholding the law, after all," he had said, and despite the desires that tortured him, he had joined our vegetarian meals.
***
After dinner, I went outside to feed Regina. Regina was the single hen that we owned. Back when my parents had bought the house from its previous tenant, an old man who had decided to move to a retirement home, we had inherited the small shed of chickens belonging to the house and had enjoyed fresh eggs for breakfast until all of the chickens had died from old age. By now, Regina was the only one left and had only been named after all her companions were gone. This had amused my uncle, who quoted something by Schopenhauer about animals lacking individuality and observed that it had taken the death of everybody else for Regina to gain an identity. As I said, my uncle was in a bad place that summer.
Regina had originally been named T-Regina, the female version of T-Rex, because I had read somewhere on the internet that chickens had evolved from dinosaurs, but the name had quickly devolved to its current form. These days, Regina was ancient and didn’t lay any more eggs. We guessed her to be at least thirteen years old. Over time, my mother, who owned a small store for sports equipment, had brought home a colorful assortment of discarded golf balls Regina could sit upon, trying to hatch them. When Regina saw me approach with the bag of seeds, she laboriously got up from the ground of the shed where she was perched and waddled towards me, her ruffled gray feathers a sad contrast to her neon-painted fake eggs. I was watching her pecking at the fodder when I suddenly heard my uncle’s voice behind me. I was startled because I hadn’t noticed him follow me outside. “To be the last one of one’s kind," he said, watching Regina, “and yet be so content.” Regina paused to meet his gaze, and I don’t know why, but from this day on, I checked in on Regina more often than I usually did.
One evening, as I was coming back from the shed in the dark, there was a body lying on our front porch. Or so I thought, because when I came closer, with bated breath, I saw that it was a homeless man who had decided to spend the night on our property. The man was of indefinite age, gaunt and bearded, and lay snoring amidst a pile of plastic bags filled to the brim with trash. I didn’t know how to feel about him. On the one hand, I was kind of shocked by his intrusion. One’s home should be one’s safe place, and to see it violated by a stranger in such an intimate way somehow felt wrong to me. On the other hand, it was exactly the intimacy of the situation that had me tiptoe back to the door so as to not disturb the poor man in his sleep.
I let myself in quietly and was startled once again as my uncle was standing motionless in the dark behind the window, looking outside like a vampire in contemplation of his castle.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
My uncle turned towards me. “I heard you leave the house and was watching you in case something happened. Have you noticed the drifter?”
“How long has he been there?”
“Oh, he arrived some two hours ago. You actually went by him without noticing him when you went for the shed.”
“You could have said something.”
“Don’t worry," my uncle said. “I would have interfered if there had been any danger to you.”
“Do you think I should wake mom and dad?” I asked him. “Or maybe call the police? I mean, this could be considered trespassing, couldn’t it?”
My uncle nodded. “It definitely could, and I see that this is disturbing you. But if I were to give you advice as a theologian, it would be this: Before you act, imagine yourself to be a character in a biblical parable. Now, how will this parable go? A wealthy family found a beggar peacefully sleeping in front of their door. When the son of the family beheld this, he was very frightened, and in his anger, he called for the watch who removed the man. Or will it rather be: When the son of the family beheld this, he was stricken with compassion, and he tiptoed back to his door so as to not wake the man?”
I turned red in the dark, because my uncle, watching me from the window, had obviously seen right through me.
“Nonetheless," my uncle continued, “I think that we should get the chicken. Regina might not be safe out there.”
This hadn’t occurred to me yet. “Do you think he might kill her?” I asked.
“Hunger can be stronger than morals," my uncle answered. “Do you want me to get her?”
I hesitated. “It’s all right. I will get Regina," I said. “Will you watch out for me?”
“Of course,” my uncle said, once again taking up his watch at the window.
I snuck back to the shed, careful not to wake the man sleeping on our porch, and picked up Regina. The hen was dozing and felt surprisingly light as I clutched her to my chest. My uncle opened the door for us, and when I got inside, I felt like danger had been averted. Regina was still sleeping; she was hard to wake these days and would have been easy prey. I was, however, somewhat clueless as to what to do with her now, as my parents had never allowed animals inside our house.
My uncle, again seemingly able to read my mind, offered to let the hen sleep with him in his guest room. “I could make a nest for her from some of my old essays," he said. But I declined politely and took Regina back to my room, where I sat her on a spare pillow.
You’d imagine that owning a pet chicken should make you somewhat popular at school, or at least interesting, but it was that time when everyone of my classmates was more interested in chicks than in chickens, and besides, Regina should have hatched a football instead of some bourgeois golf balls, anyway. I didn’t care for team sports at all. The only sport I liked was going to the swimming hall late at night, when they turned on their colorful mood lighting and you had the swim lane all for yourself. My mother deserves eternal credit for always accepting my lack of sportiness despite her owning the sports store. She may have made a joke about it here and there, but all in all, she lacked that Mr. Hyde personality that surfaces in most people when they think you are holding the racket wrong.
Alas, the same couldn’t be said about my classmates, and so I often had no one to talk to. When I told my uncle this, he surprised me with a handwritten voucher that would allow me to strike up a conversation with him about whichever topic I liked, whenever I liked. It was one of the most thoughtful presents I’d ever received, and I was very moved. I decided to redeem my coupon one day during an excruciatingly boring dinner that was attended by some of my father’s fellow politicians.
“As a theologian," I asked him, “how do you feel about an afterlife?”
“First”, my uncle said, “I’d be interested as to why you’re asking this now.”
“We had a discussion in school about it, and when our teacher asked us, I couldn’t decide between three different answers. I felt like the most honest answer was that we cannot know if there is an afterlife and that it is pointless to speculate about it. But then, I can imagine an afterlife and hope that it exists. On the other hand, when we die and our brains stop working, we probably just fade away.” I felt quite edgy when I said the latter.
“As a theologian," my uncle said, “I don’t have much to add. You seem to have already covered quite a spectrum of opinions with your three answers. But I believe that the most important thing you said was that part about imagining an afterlife. The way I see it, the question if there is a life after death, if it exists in itself, is not even that relevant. What’s more important is that we can create an afterlife for ourselves--and others--by imagining it.”
I wasn’t sure I understood this, so my uncle kept explaining: “Remember what I said about dignity, and that even if someone doesn’t possess some inherent dignity, we can still grant it to them by projecting it onto them by way of our imagination? I think it might be the same with an afterlife. As a theologian, I am constantly asked by grieving relatives if I believe in paradise, as if what I believe were an objective truth that they could cling to. But my answer is always the same: What I believe doesn’t matter, only what they believe themselves. If they believe that there is an afterlife for their loved ones, then there will be one. They create it by believing in it.”
“So say that Regina dies of old age one day," I said, “I could create an afterlife for her as well?”
“Definitely," my uncle said. “By the way, I always proposed this as a means for the ethical consumption of animals. We could eat meat in a conscious way by simultaneously granting the animals their dignity.”
I was quite alarmed by this. “But then you could also be doing something evil and simply use your imagination to give it a veneer of good!”
“I suppose you could," my uncle nodded, “imagination is a two-faced sword.” And he cast a regretful glance at his vegetable stir fry.
***
A few weeks later, when I went to the shed, Regina was dead.
The hen was lying on her back, her clawed feet protruding up in the air amidst her golf balls like a murderer’s hands from a swamp. To an outside observer, the image might have had something grotesquely funny about it, but I was relieved to discover that Regina had indeed died of old age. She looked as peaceful as a chicken could look, and I knew that she’d had a remarkably long and comfortable life with us. I didn’t feel like crying--I was fifteen, and crying seemed inappropriate--but I was quite sad when I went back to the house and told my family about my discovery.
Apparently, there were pretty strict rules on how to dispose of a dead animal. We should have called some veterinarian agency who would have collected Regina to cremate her, but my father saw my sadness and, with uncharacteristic irrationality, proposed that we should bury her.
That afternoon, we gathered in our yard, and my father dug a hole with a shovel. I was once again surprised by my uncle, who had donned his academic gown and looked like a pastor. He had retreated to his guestroom after I had found Regina dead, and when he came out of his study, he had written a small sermon, about one and a half pages, for our chicken. “To help your imagination," he stated.
And so, we said our words of farewell to Regina, my father shoveled some earth onto her dead body, my mother actually did cry a bit, and I was so enraptured with my uncle’s sermon that I didn’t even hear his stomach growl.
***
The summer went by, and in October, some workmen called and said that my uncle’s house was habitable again and that the new security system had been installed. The students who had attacked my uncle were featured in the students’ magazine and lauded for their civil courage, but my uncle’s lectures for the winter semester would take place as planned, and the scandal was soon forgotten.
We waved my uncle goodbye when he moved back to his town, my parents silently relieved that after two months, they for once didn’t have to host anyone, and me somewhat disappointed that life would return to a boring normal again. It’s much more exciting when my uncle is here, and I am always looking forward to his visits these days. In the end, I believe that my uncle may at once be one of the most moral and one of the most lonely people that I know--one thing probably comes with the other--even though I will never be able to shake the feeling that he regards the world with a dark hunger.
Florian Albrod, born in 1993, holds a diploma in protestant theology as well as being a resident physician. He lives in Hamburg, Germany. During his studies, he has been working as a freelance translator of Fantasy- and Science-Fiction-novels as well as for a local newspaper. His short stories have been published by literary journal “Johnny” and by Austrian publisher “Verlag ohneohren”; a creative contribution of his to Jewish studies appeared in "Zeramim". While writing at a bar, he was once bitten by an anthroposophist.
Find him on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FlorianAlbrodAutor/
Find him on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FlorianAlbrodAutor/
