I know, I know – it sounds a bit pretentious, as if I’m about to enlighten you, explain it all, right? And yet, have you ever really thought about the word mercy? Have you noticed, for example, how rarely it appears in daily life – how all of us avoid it almost instinctively? Mercy? Ohhh, come on, don’t bother me with that nonsense! Or, in a milder version: „Well, I don’t know… it sounds awkward somehow. Mercy? Who even talks about things like that nowadays? Sounds like… something from the Bible or from children’s books, I don’t know. Come on, let’s talk about something else.“

Something like that – or close to it – is what I imagine to be the normal, everyday reaction to this unsettling word. Mercy. Wait, hold on – I’m not God, am I?

Exactly. That’s the whole discomfort, the unease rubbing under the skin of this word, this idea. Mercy doesn’t belong to everyday life – it sounds more like a line from some old, hopelessly sentimental play – or from a children’s game. Only a child would dare shout it aloud – „Mercy! Mercy! Mercy!“ – and only because the child still doesn’t understand what it means, what they’re pleading for, what they’re insisting on.

That – or the exact opposite: those terrifying, as-rare-as-a-comet’s-passing moments in a person’s life, when everything hangs by a thread, when he or she has abandoned all pretence, all poses, all armour and now lies face down, or maybe face up, arms outstretched in a posture of utter despair, total surrender before the undeniable force of whatever has brought them to this point – and more or less whispers, insists, begs, no longer caring about things like dignity, decency, or just normality: hey… Mercy, mercy, mercy!

But nooo, it doesn’t happen that easily! The human is a sly little beast – trained in both little and much – and knows how to simulate everything, including ultimate despair, surrender, tears, remorse, snot – the whole show. Only the world knows all this too – and it doesn’t loosen its grip, doesn’t loosen its grip, doesn’t loosen its grip. Mercy, huh? Then why do you still stare so intently at yourself when you pass the mirror? And why are you making plans for the future if you’re so desperate, so surrendered, huh? Let’s test you a bit more!

And so, you think you’re desperate, that you’ve surrendered, that you’re finished – but the world, the Universe, God out there knows far better than you do. He/she/it sees that you’re just pretending – and keeps piling on more weight, more little sacks onto your back. Desperate, are you? Let’s see now… Aha! Look how wide your eyes go, see how you keep dragging yourself forward – on your belly, on your back, whatever works. You’re fineee, you’ve got plenty left in you.

And so it goes, until you surrender completely, until you finally spread yourself out in total exhaustion, lie down and prepare to accept whatever comes. Whatever – just let there be an end. Send me an end, God, or whatever you are – damn you! Send me an end – I don’t care anymore!

Send me an end!

⸻ ❦ ⸻

So we – that is, Todorka and I – ended up in something like a stalemate. Neither one way nor the other. She could see, she could feel, that I wasn’t pretending, I really couldn’t put one foot in front of the other anymore – I was trying somehow to find a way, to put an end to our mutual agony, but nothing worked, no matter how hard I tried. And she herself no longer knew what to do with me – couldn’t throw me out, couldn’t keep me with her either. She was at a loss, poor thing.

And then a close acquaintance of ours, Kerstin D., gave us a piece of advice: „Look, I understand that you’re both suffering, but keep in mind that the real victims of all this are the children. You both grew up in families with two parents, but I come from a divorced family, and I know from personal experience what it’s like to grow up in such a situation. It’s absolutely crucial that you don’t make an irreversible mistake – go and do a family constellation to see what the children really feel about all this.“

Ugh, now it got complicated. I can already see some people scratching their heads: „See what the kids think? What kind of stupidity is that – don’t they have mouths, why not just ask them? Okay, we get it for the little one, but the older one, surely he understands everything?“

Forgive me if I underestimate anyone. Actually, this (highly uninformed) reaction tends to come mostly from men – and especially from very inexperienced ones. Women usually sense these things more subtly. But let me explain: it’s a well-known fact that young children usually perceive their parents’ divorce as their own personal fault: „Mum or Dad is leaving because I was bad, right?“ This trait of the child’s psyche – the exact explanation of which I don’t know – leads to serious trauma, and children generally carry it with them for life. And Kerstin, who had been through it all, gave us the only genuinely useful advice in that moment.

„Fine, let’s assume that’s true. But what is this ‘family constellation’? Some kind of fortune-teller or shaman who’ll tell you what your kids think? I thought Germany was a bit more cultured, more civilised.“

I’ve written about all this elsewhere, so I’ll refer you again to that earlier text, to avoid retelling what has already been told. Here, I’ll just include a short quote from that earlier piece as orientation for those who don’t like jumping from page to page in the middle of reading.

Psychodrama, as many of you probably know, is a relatively new alternative to classical psychotherapy, which more and more people today – professionals or not – are beginning to view with scepticism. Freudianism, like Marxism, seems to be turning more into doctrine than a means of solving practical problems. I’m not here to start a doctrinal debate – I mention this only as an explanation for the growing interest and hope with which many people now prefer to try something new and practical, rather than spend years in conversations whose only clear and undisputed meaning is the therapist’s fee. Let me add that in the developed world today, visiting a therapist is no longer seen as a sign of illness. Therapy and treatment are not the same thing. One seeks therapy the way one seeks help from friends – only, in this case, the friends are people specifically trained to offer this kind of help. And – quite reasonably – they ask to be paid for it. Everything in this world has value – and the price, as we all know, is just a reflection of that simple fact.

In short: psychodrama involves a group of people – usually from three or four up to about ten – and the process consists of „acting out“ scenes and events from the life of one of the participants (it can be more than one, but not at the same time, of course). There is no other preparation apart from the (voluntary) assignment of roles and as little prior information as possible – just enough for people to know roughly what’s being presented. (For example: what kind of physical suffering or what problem the person is dealing with, plus a few words about the individuals to be represented – most often members of the closest family circle of the „person in therapy,“ but not rarely entirely abstract notions as well: if someone has a problem with „money“ or „success,“ those may appear as actual characters in the drama. I myself once played the role of „the cruelty of life.“) The result – far easier to experience than to describe – varies in intensity: from a half-boring run-through of someone’s swampy relationship with, say, an aunt on his mother’s side, to terrifyingly shocking outbursts of pain, suffering, and catharsis. I’ve seen people cry and roll on the floor. I’ve seen myself cry in ways I never believed a grown man could. At least once, I experienced one of the most important miracles of my life – but that’s for another time, if there’s time.

And so we packed our things and went to a family constellation. Both of us already had serious experience with this powerful therapeutic technique. Both of us had gone through its magic repeatedly – intensely, and with significant healing effect. Both of us had managed to clarify many things in our otherwise deeply bogged-down relationships with our parents (again, perhaps something that had strongly connected us). But that also meant we both had a fairly clear idea of what we were getting into. A family constellation is anything but entertainment, anything but a game. You have to be prepared for all kinds of surprises – most of them hard to swallow. Who could have known that in this particular constellation we would come face to face with something bordering on a miracle?

So we went „prepared,“ meaning accompanied by a whole squad of friends (without the children, of course – they have absolutely no place at such a session; the psychological load can be too much even for mature adults). Our usual therapist, Ms. Sakino (I’ll use that pseudonym), was running a session with several participants, so some time passed before it was our turn…

Whew – even now, after so many years, the band tightens around my temples. Maybe I should explain: I went into the session without expecting a single thing. What I wrote above about total surrender wasn’t fiction. I had given up. Full stop. I saw the session as a formality, a kind of final signing of the sentence. As far as I remember, I was completely apathetic and disengaged, perceiving everything through a haze – what’s the point of watching; everything’s clear; I just want it to be over as soon as possible…

And then the usual procedure began: we placed our „two children“ on the stage, who were supposed to tell us „what they think.“ In practice, this meant that the roles of the children would be played by two of the participants, chosen purely by intuition (either Doreen or I – I don’t remember which – had to ask one man and one woman among the group whether they „wanted to be“ our children, i.e., whether they agreed to play those roles). The procedure works without a hitch; we had experienced it many times before. Everyone with enough experience of this technique knows it.

So the two of them stood on the stage. Usually, things unfold with complete freedom of interpretation – people say „whatever comes to mind.“ But in this case, I think Sakino was asking them questions. I don’t remember, I don’t remember…

And then came the moment that changed my entire life, that made me believe that „someone up there“ was watching over me for whatever reason, that there was mercy – even for me…

Ugh, damn it!

The two „children“ clasped their hands, turned to us, and said:

Well, we don’t want to stay with Mum. We want to be with Dad.

And thunder cracked, and the stone at the entrance shifted, and light flooded the cave, and two heavenly angels flew down, putting a shoulder under each arm – and they pulled me out, toward the light, toward life, toward a new beginning…

⸻ ❦ ⸻

Rattle, prattle, and a smack!

Of course, I would have liked to tell you something grandiose – kind of biblical, if possible, something with a more epochal ring to it, right? I mean, come on, I’m telling you about the greatest miracle of my life so far.

I wish I could – but no.

The reality was that I sat in my chair almost like the proverbial guy who’d just been slapped across the face with a wet rag, straining to grasp what had happened, but my mind refused to accept it. Only my body – a wise assembly of genes, some of them millions of years old – had already snapped to what had happened, and of course it was convulsing in uncontrollable spasms. I cried, brother, cried so hard I couldn’t get two words out.

Zlatko Enev is a Bulgarian writer and publisher of the webzine Liberal Review. He has published seven books in Bulgaria (the children’s trilogy Firecurl, 2001-2005), the novels One Week in Paradise (2004) and Requiem for Nobody (2011), the collection of essays The Heat as the Embodiment of the Bulgarian (2010) and the autobiographical novel Praise of Hans Asperger (2020). His children’s books have been translated into several languages, including Chinese. He has lived in Berlin since 1990.