Before long, he realized he was following in the footsteps of my grandfather. He knew that if he continued on the same path, he would wind up dead, just like his father before him.
So, he moved to a new country to seek his fortune and make something of himself. There, he found work on a pig farm. It wasn't well-paid, but it was an honest job. He met a young girl and eventually they got married and had a baby.
When war broke out, he was forced to join the military and fight for a country that was not his own. He killed so many people in that nightmarish war, he couldn't keep count. After a while, he started to think that the more enemy soldiers he killed, the sooner the war would be over and he could return to his wife and child.
When the war finally did come to an end, he returned home to find that his baby had been killed in a bombing raid and his wife had gone out of her mind. He was forced to leave her to her fate and flee the country.
Whenever my father talked about this period of his life, he always said the same thing... "This world is hell".
Eventually, his travels brought him back to the town where he was born. There, he met my mother and they got married. Before long, they had two children, my elder brother and I.
When I was a child, I remember how my father would sit at the kitchen table, drinking himself into a stupor every night. He always had a vicious scowl on his face. He had had a very hard life.
My father hated my guts. Every time he drank, he got violent. He often beat me until I was black and blue all over. Sometimes I feared he would kill me.
One day, my mother told me to go to the slaughterhouse and bring my father his lunch. When I got there, I found him killing pigs in the yard, under the blazing sun. He was naked from the waist up and was beating the pigs to death with a baseball bat. It was a horrific scene.
