Work Text:
Bent over a sheet, the little girl fiercely pressed the quill, soaked excessively in black ink, on the sheet that had become filled with fingerprints, smudges thrown gaily here and there and thick lines that trembled like rods. All of the above undulated unpleasantly.
Her brows were furrowed, her mouth was raised at the right corner, while her lips werepressed one over the other.
She looked at the paper her father was writing on and felt dismayed at the sight of the beautiful lines that undulated pleasantly one after the other. Returning to her messy paper, she frowned, then took the pen in her hand once more.
She queezed it hard until her fingertips turned red and she begin to draw lines on the paper.
No matter how much she curled the lines, no matter how much she shrunk those lines, no matter how much she tried to imitate what her father did, she couldn't.
Angry, she let the feather fall on the table and stretched her head more and more to see better her father’s paper. She felt so confused, for she did exactly what her father did, but the outcome of her mirroring was a disaster of smudges, soaked dots and trembling thick lines. All looked so messy compared to her father`s clean writing.
„Father! Father, how do you do that?” It took a while for Linarian to snap out of the spell of concentration and to come back down to earth. Shaking his head as if to banish a thought, he looked up at the other end of the table where the child was seated. He heard her, but it took him a while to understand what she was reffering to.
„Do you want to learn how to write?” As he uttered the question, he felt burdened by a fatigue he had not felt when he was caught up in writing.
The girl just nod in approval and quickly jumped out of her chair, running to his side.
”What did you do on your hands, child! Go and wash yourself quickly while I bring you a chair.” Quickly, the girl ran out of the room laughing merrily.
The rain was still pounding against the window. The sound of drops hitting the glass with force began to sound somehow melodious, as if carrying a resonance of its own.
Linarian felt the need to unwind and relax, but he felt he could not take his word back, responsibility was his first priority as a father. This was his own saying he pushed upon himself from dawn to midnight.
Arranging the papers and bringing the chairs side by side, Linarian looked for the quill with which the child had written until then. He only saw it later, when he took a step back, it lied fallen by the foot of the table.
After cleaning it in water and wiping it, he left it next to a white sheet that he had taken out for Letitia.
Her old sheet was an amalgam of smudges, uncertain scribbles and fingerprints, it couldn’t be used.
Seated on the chair the child was swinging her feet to and fro. Impatient she watched as her father’s large hand, moved slowly across the sheet, drawing simple shapes unlike anything she had seen before.
”These are not like the ones you used to make earlier. Why? I want to do what you do.” Letitia bit her lip, she looked sadly at the separated forms which looked so strange and then at her father. Letitia observed the lines and circles her father drew earlier were more complicated, took more space on the paper and were more beautiful. What he drew for her now, was short and tight. She wanted an explanation.
„To write words you must first learn to write the letters, one by one letters are combined togheter to make words.” Letitia was not convinced, she looked with disbelief and doubt through her long black eyelashes at her father’s serious figure.
Sighing, the father tried to rephrase his words to convince her of his truth. „Be careful here, if you don’t know how to walk step by step you can’t run. Not?” Letitia nooded. ”If you don’t have vegetables, borscht, tomatoes, bones, meat, oil, can you make soup?”
„Not.” Answering the rethorical question herself, the girl looked away from her father’s face and at the sheets lined up on the desk. She was searching for similarities between those mismatched shapes and in everything her father had written earlier. She could see that the letters resembled parts of the words, small bits. Suddenly she felt a little overwhelmed when she saw how much she had to learn.
”Take the pen in your hand so I can teach you to write a few letters.”
”I want to learn them all.” With a whiny voice, the girl sulks and drops the feather from her hand.
”Eh, you want to do everything in one day! Even spring does not come with a flower! Come on, give me your hand!” Placing his palm around Letitia’s hand, Linarian tried to create a loose grip. But Letitia, distracted by the warm sweat gathered in her father’s palm, quickly pulled her hand aside.
It came as a surprise for Linarian.
”Your hand is sweaty. Yuck!” Commenting, the girl put her small hand aside and wiped it on the ink stained blue dress.
”How many claims.” Wiping his palm on his pants as well, he resumed the lesson without giving the girl a break for comments and grumbling.
Linarian was lightly traceing the pattern of the letter A and patiently following the same process for whole rows.
The child was fascinated by it. Her eyes were fixed on the letter emerging from beneath the smooth movement of the nib. It seemed so easy to her and she wondered how she hadn’t discovered this way of drawing herself. But when she was left on her own, the girl had begun to see how the lines didn’t turned out so beautifully, the letter was crooked to the right. To her surprise, she discovered that there was no way to straighten it. Frustrated, she bit her lower lip and pressed harder on the feather, hoping to somehow force the lines to fall the way she wanted them to. Yet the lines were stubborn and kept getting crooked and twisted, as if to mock her.
”Don’t squeeze the quil so hard, it’s insides will come out.” This words told on a very concerned tone made the little girl to stop and stare worried at the feather.
”The feather has no insides!” To convince herself, Letitia lifted the feather and looked carefully, it was empty. ”It has no intestines!” She repeated her statement a little louder then looked at her father who was holding back a laughter.
”You panick and press too hard on the quill, the letters don’t come out by themselves, not from only the quill, you write them alone with your wrist.” Taking Letitia’s small hand in his, Linarian adjusted the hold on the quill and diped the pointed tip into the ink. ”When you write, keep your hand relaxed around the feather, it won’t run away. Just like this.”
Suddenly letting his grip dissipate, he dipped the quill into the ink again.
He wrote again, this time slowly and he took his time to complete the half of a row. ”See, it’s easier if I don’t tighten the grip on the feather. I can move my hand faster on the sheet and my wrist won’t hurt either.”
Left on her own, again, Letitia panicked.
Her hand clutched the quill too hard. Crushed with force it broke under the pressure, leaving behind a black pit.
”It’s too hard. I can’t write.” Letitia complained fiercely, feeling the tears nest in her eyes.
Linarian expected this, he just placed his palm on her shoulder holding her lightly.
”With practice you will end up writing like me. I didn’t wrote that well at first either, I’m sorry I don’t have the sheets from then to show to you.” Linarian continued to speak to her in the same calm tone. He wanted to explain to Letitia that the beginning was always hard for anyone, always full of complications when the mechanism was not completelly grasped.
He sought to teach her that there was no shame in learning.
”Are you going to try to write four lines on your own?” Letitia just nodded her head in a sort motion. Beginning with intense attention, she was trying not to clutch the feather fiercely.
The girl felt like giving up, but her father’s little encouragement made her want to try one last time. She remembered how his large hand guided hers with sure movements, she wasn’t sure of herself when she was alone.
It was easier when she was drawing, she didn’t felt overwhelmed or scared.
She was looking spitefully at the letter on the top of the row, beautifully written by her father’s hand.
Letitia took a deep breath and looked carefully at it. But she found nothing to guide her, only the memory and the calm words of her father.
Linarian could clearly see how Letitia was ready to give up. Children were as transparent as glass.
Confronted with a task so heavy Letitia felt she couldn’t do it and that she never would. But, hearing her father tell her that it was difficult for him too in the beginning she begin to gain courage.
To ease the doubt she begin to move the quill and to adjust it just to avoid the writing process.
Feeling this hiding became heavier then the tool of learning, the girl took a deep breath and begin to do it once more, after moments of just drawing lines and circles, to her father`s annoyance.
Linarian felt the impulse to scold her, for her lazyness and for her cowardice. Yet, he kept his silence, his words were sealed even if he had many things to say, it wouldn’t solve anything.
In fact he would do worse.
He didn’t wanted to discourage her, because she didn’t meet his ideal that he, as a father, aspired to see from his child.
He knew from observation and experience when discouragement came from father or mother, it was the most painful form of rejection and humiliation.
He repeated to himself, in the innermost part of his conscience, that he would not resort to the tactics of education through humiliation and degradation. For the nephalem had clearly seen that abasement and humiliation only created limitation and fear.
Putting someone down will not make them strive to rise up. It will just teach them to comply, to stay there, down, in the mud. He felt so fulfilled when he realized this fundamental truth early in his youth.
While watching over his life as a young lad in the house and care of his parents, he realized he never learned anything from their harsh teaching. Their iron grip and high pedestals made him to give all up. It felt useless when it was out of touch.
As a young lad, he would often ran away to play and have fun, thus ignoring his own potential and duties.
As a man, Linarian saw this type of education made him turn to hedonism to aliviate his sense of not belonging, his sense of nothingness. He felt so agrieved he wasted so many years sealed by his own doings in a vortex of pleasures which became so distant and so hard to remember and feel. After those momentary calls of the body were fulfilled to the crescendo.
Pleasure was a moment, so small in the scheme of life, so insignifiant to his growing. He saw his own failure only when he was too tired to indoulge in the same routine of devouring and wasting, he felt so disgusted with himself then.
That disgust so bitter it made him shudder from body to the core of the conscience. With a hard grip over himself he deconstructed his own self in order to build someone else who will never let himself down to misery and despair so easy again. It felt sometimes so unreal, like he was looking at someone else who had nothing in common with him. But he put those incomfortable thoughts aside, he looked again at Letitia who filled one page and a hold while he was brieflt passing over it all.
Letitia’s hand was no longer trembling, her head was bent over the page to better see the writing process.
Carefully she was tracing the pattern of the letter on the sheet, this time she no longer tried to force the feather to make the word, but rather she let her hand to do it.
Glancing over the sheet again, he noted with joy an improvement in the way she wrote.
Letitia no longer hunched over the sheet, nor did she scratched the paper, but she had begun to handle the pen more lightly, even to be more precise in her approach.
The child had begun to pay attention to how she wrote, not how she wanted the writing to appear on the paper. There was a tiny bit of improvement in the way of aesthetics, but worth noting.
“Look child you get used to it and it became better!” Placing his finger on the first line she had written, Linarian compared it to the last letter which had come out quite successfully.
Stopping from writing, Letitia looked immediatly over the whole pages, in an instant she noticed that the letter was no longer so loose. She saw that it had started to resemble the one written by her father.
Laughing with delight, Letitia huged her father tightly thanking him, then she started to write more whilst giggling happily.