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05:25

Melquiades’ life was full of those lovely monotonous days filled with peace, boredom, routine tasks, new books read, new languages acquired, diplomas obtained while all-the-important-world-matters were happening behind his back. He hadn’t experienced war, the news of the international conflict of World War 2 hit him hard, but no harder than the extinction of animals in his home country. At first, he missed his abandoned motherland, sent letter after letter but contact with K. was almost impossible. There were more important matters than one boy’s wish to maintain relations with his natives and no letters to and from were allowed. People were dying on the battlefields, in gas chambers, they were shot in the cities’ apprising. Families were divided and broken, friends separated, children died before their parents, breaking the natural order of things. Millions perished in front of the eyes of history, leaving relatives heartbroken. Times were hard. K. was a silent land in the storm of shaping nations. There was nothing about K. in newspapers and slowly the boy started to believe in Jacob’s mean remarks from the past that he had been sent not to educate himself, but he was simply unloved and rejected. Melquiades knew that his father loved Jacob far more but he couldn’t have been deprived of all kindness. This made him confused.

He grew, changed and shaped his mind. From a lanky youth, he became a well-built man who sunk into the foreign world. He quickly learned the language and the ways of his new mates, behaved like a proper immigrant with no wish to leave. He finished his studies, got a job, bought a flat. He even had one love affair but, facing the actual threat of marriage and the burden of family duties, he decided to end it, suspecting that he was simply unable to be the head of the family. He always felt like a younger brother among older siblings. He wanted to maintain being a branch, not a trunk and constantly felt like a son obeying his father, wishing to never fully grow up. This attitude stayed with him until he was sixty-three.

One morning Melquiades was reading his morning newspaper and drinking coffee in a nearby cafe. The world was changing continually and rather ignored Melquiades’ existence. Until that time he lived in the bubble of memories of K. mixed with the enjoyment of day-to-day life. Books were his only friends, professors only people to look up to, news presenters - only partners in one-way conversation. He almost forgot the tastes and smells of his previous life as well as his mother tongue which he hadn't used for such a long time. His youth in K. was his past and a life never meant to be lived again.

Until one morning he opened the third page of his daily newspaper.

The Hub of the Past.

Do you believe that society seems civilized and the Holocaust was the worst thing that could have happened to the human kind? Think twice. While Europe experienced the lasting turnover of political power and seems to be clinging to its humanitarian ideas, there are still countries which haven’t changed their pre-war ways. What is more, they don’t even enjoy such comforts of life as a TV-set, a washing machine, a car, a wireless or an adapter. Completely isolated from the society due to some mass death of animals dating to 1919 the inhabitants continue to live our grandfathers’ ways. According to (yet unconfirmed) information on a daily basis, the citizens of K. have to deal with segregation and the lack of proper medical care. The majority of people are illiterate and have no access to education. The sick and elderly are thrown out to the streets and forgotten while children as young as ten become pregnant thanks to their unappeased sexual drive and the lack of contraceptives. Interesting place for a summer vacation? Not so much. The country shut the borders with neighboring nations and no one has visited it since 1919. The borders were closed and the leader of the nation wants to maintain it this way, holding a grudge against K.'s neighbors for not offering any help and rejecting the offers of commerce in the past after their major food crisis some fifty years ago. K. is now a weird absolute monarchy ruled by no other but the wealthiest farmer in the country who can with one word wipe thousands of his own citizens out and does so with a total approval of his people. You’d think humans could be more animal-like? Think yet again. In K. there are still no animals. The country was surrounded by a safely guarded wall. If anything, there might be only birds.

And from one little black and white photograph under the article one strangely familiar man was smiling with his mouth sealed. The one and only monarch of K. He might have grown older, fatter and balder but Melquiades would never forget that persona. Still handsome after the passing years: minor wrinkles hadn't changed his face at all and there were still some asymmetries in the way he was looking at things. Jacob.

And Melquiades within a second turned wet from the amount of sweat his body produced in the same state of shock he experienced when the last animal was buried in the ground those fifty years ago.