The adventures of Dora Salonica

In an interview, the Israeli writer David Grossman talked about the tattooed number his aunt had on her arm, a reminder of her incarceration in a concentration camp during the Holocaust, the Shoah.

“When I got married, my aunt covered her number with a sticking plaster, so as not to cast gloom over the day, and I must tell you that is still one of the strongest memories of my wedding. My heart flew out to her. I thought: how terrible it is that you feel you must be apologetic about what was done to you.”

I was branded by my Master, on 28 February 2009. It was a Saturday night and it was the first time we ever met. We were probably too hasty in doing what we did, but that is how it goes with people’s dreams. When they realize they are living out their dream, there is very little they can do to negate the truth of what is happening, to be rational, to think about facts. The dream has its own momentum, its own power and it carries one away, to the farthest recesses of the mind, where one becomes a tyrant or a lamb within a minute.

A year and a half later, I was “dumped”, as a prospective owner called the release. The prospective owner met with the fate he deserved. He failed to combine sensitivity with the esthetics of sadism. My respect and arousal disappeared instantly. Those two usually go together. Lose one and you will lose the other, faster than lightning strikes. A release is the right of every Owner, even if done whimsically, out of a sudden realization that the dream has turned to a nightmare, or just because a flying bird has just discovered it has no wings, and plunges down to darkness, in impotence and defeat.

I went on my way. It did not matter. It was then that some friends noticed the scar on my right shoulder and said it looked ugly. It was true that it had swollen as time had gone by and it had turned into a very ugly scar. I started feeling bad about it. In the beginning I tried to wear clothes that hid it. Later on, I went to a plastic surgeon. He tried to make the scar disappear, by injecting the inflamed tissue with cortisone. I went to the hospital for three months in a row, and every time the doctor gave me five or six painful injections, inside the scar. There we were, in that tiny room, me and my accomplice, trying to annihilate the past. Trying to peel off what I am, what I have become. From the first time, the swelling went down and the scar started to disappear, turning into a white, very discrete mark.

Can I really stop being what I am, with a few injections of cortisone? And what am I, even if I am released, even if I am branded with a mark that has lost its symbolism, since it has lost the man that went with it, what am I even if am alone, in the coziness of my room, with a wound between my legs and a disappearing scar on my right shoulder? Am I really different from the woman I was on that Saturday, 28 September 2009?

Why was the survivor of the Shoah ashamed of her tattoo? And why did I go to the doctor to make my past disappear?

We should wear our marks with pride. We should never be ashamed of what has left its indelible mark on us. We should be proud of everything that has made us what we are today.

Bear your scars with pride. Prepare for new ones. Chase your dreams without despairing, and be yourself, to the END.

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The Thermaikos Bay where I ride my bike is a quiet place. I go there sometimes to take my decisions. The sea smells badly in the summer, because of the sewers. Seagulls fly above the water, touching it every now and then on extended wings. It seems romantic, but in reality they are looking for human excrement. This is the sea of my hometown, where beauty and ugliness merge. Human souls are a bit like that too. Une mélange…You cannot separate the light from its shadows. What you touch in your loved ones, when you dare touch them, is a reflection of colors, some dark, some brilliant, a confusion of feelings and thoughts, kind acts, cruel acts, the waltz of ghosts dancing around you, always leaving their mark on you, no matter how softly they pass by. And the dreams being born in the blue light of dawn are sometimes lost for ever, leaving behind them the sweet smell of death.

I do not know if Greece is a place that is dying. Nor do I know if I shall be here to see it happen. I would like to leave before winter sets in. But before I go, I might just have time for one more ride, one more dream, on my old, rusty bike...

These are my eyes. My eyes are yours. I will tell you what they have seen. The first light of the day is blue, did you know that? My eyes have seen the death and rebirth of a thousand blue dreams.

These are my hands. My hands are yours. With my hands I have shaped the memories that make me what I am today. With my hands I will trace your wishes, follow your desires, build for me the future that you have designed.

These are my breasts. My breasts are yours. At nights I lie in my cold bed, feeling my breasts under the blankets. My breasts are soft and warm and bursting with desire for your touch.

This is my belly. My belly is yours. Make it your pillow. Place the palm of your hand on my belly and feel my flesh. There is more here than skin and tissue and blood and nerves. The history of mankind lies in the secrets of a woman’s belly.

These are my legs. My legs are yours. See how they wrap themselves around you, as if life itself depended on their strength. They are slender but can transport me to the corners of the earth, and they will, if you say the word.

These are my feet. My feet are yours. They are very small and very white, with blue veins. An array of thin bones is jutting under the skin. And yet the soles of my feet are sturdy, to carry the weight of my obligations to you. I will not fail.

These are my genitals. My genitals are yours. They are the center of my desire. Take the gift, hold it carefully. Desire is a fragile thing but mine is stronger than all the oceans of the world. This is sea water coming out of me. It is yours too.

This is my heart. My heart is yours. This is my hair. My hair is yours. This is my mouth. My mouth is yours.

This is my body. My body is yours.

You will have your hair cut very short, like Sharlotte Rampling in the Night Porter. Your appearance belongs to me.

In the evening I took a bike ride along the pier of my town. The weather was lovely. It was so sunny that I had to wear my sunglasses. I was wearing the light blue jacket which I really love. The place was full of people. Couples sitting on benches, young students cycling or jogging, men walking their dogs, peddlers selling handbags or athletic shoes. Salonica is a city of young people because of its University. Towns like this, where there are many young people, are always lively, full of laughter, music and love.

I remembered the last time I had taken a bike ride here. That was my last ride as a free person. I remembered how anxious I had felt then. I was full of doubt, uncertain, unhappy, trying to find some sort of answer to my questions. What was I to do? Should I take the risk? Should I change my life? Should I begin something with this interesting man who knew so much about the things I knew, who seemed to be saying the right things? It is so difficult to take decisions of this magnitude. And yet I had taken it. And that had made all the difference.

Now, one month later, I reached the end of the pier where the Music Hall has been built, at the edge of the sea. I turned around and started on the way back. I felt much better than last time. I was calm and confident and I had the Commandments to keep me warm. The Commandments connect me to the Master. They give me a sense of belonging. They make me feel so strong that almost nothing can touch me. I looked at all those young people around me, envisioning a future for themselves, a future whose meaning would be of their own making. I thought how all this was an illusion. The forces of history moved the strings for almost everyone. There were very few among them who would change their lives drastically. They would just go on doing what was expected of them.

I passed through the first park, on my right, the Park of Music. I was travelling in the direction of the wind, so I could hear only the wheels of my bike making a light squealing noise. I saw some kids on roller skates, going up and down a ramp. I thought I should one day walk along the pier with Master; he would enjoy it here, especially at sunset. The second park was the Park of Memory. Memory…I had been so afraid of memory, just one month before. I wanted to get rid of it. As I cycled closer to the centre of the town, towards the White Tower, I discovered that my mind was picking good, warm memories for me. I was only thinking about the events of last month. All the past had disappeared. That was a miracle. How did that happen? Why was I thinking only of recent events? What had happened to the bitterness and the betrayals and the disappointments? I tried to remember, but no, the memories were gone. I had no interest in them, so they were gone.

The Park of Sound was the last park I passed by. After that, the crowds became larger and the noise drowned my thoughts. I approached the end of my ride. There was the statue of Alexander the Great, then the boats in the bay, then the White Tower. It was a good ride and I had found the word of the day.

You will always wear something blue, even when you go to sleep at night. A blue scarf, a blue ring, a blue shirt… You will always be marked with blue.

So now you have a new name, a new song and a new color…

I know that the life of a slave is not an easy life in reality. Yet I will admit something which might seem a little strange but which I believe is true of most slaves. This is something I’ve learned while writing books. We always make our heroes confront various problems. The general rule, if we wish to write a good story, is that when the going gets tough, it must get tougher. It is funny, but exactly the same is true of a slave. Life sometimes seems without meaning, chaotic and absurd to the point of cruelty. I often feel I have really no other way to give it any meaning beyond this thing, which makes life even more difficult, if someone sees it as an external observer. But it does not really become more difficult, not in a fundamental way, except for practical matters. At least now I know what I am dealing with. And now it has meaning. I think that it all has to do with control. This is the greatest control I can have over my life. The self-destructive life of a slave without a Master is an attempt on her part to regain a form of control. To invent a conceptual framework. It is as if she were saying, look, I cannot do much, but at least I can hurt me really well.

Take for example the problem I have with my menses. I become very irritable just before I get my period. I do not suffer much, but I suffer enough so as to “lose” it (that is the story of my life in a nutshell). And how did Master deal with it? Instead of saying, “poor girl, lie down, have a rest and I will take care of you and everything will be fine”, which would have made matters worse, because I would have bitten his hand in ingratitude, he set a new rule that would make the situation harder for me and would make me hurt more. But now this difficulty would not be uncontrollable. It would not be a pain imposed by nature, over which I had no control. It had been imposed by Master and I would have followed it voluntarily. This immediately put the matter under my control. And it is a great relief. It is something I can handle. Still, an external observer would have thought of it as cruelty.

You will maintain contact with the world. You have lived in isolation long enough. You belong to a specific era and in order to create, you have to know where you belong. It doesn’t matter if it hurts, you will get used to it. Each day you will read a newspaper and you will be informed about what is going on in the world. You will have an opinion about politics and society and art. You will learn of all the evil things and all the unjust things and all the small kindnesses that counterbalance the most villainous acts.

You cannot do BDSM in a dungeon.

If we isolate each word that has any significance for us and analyse it in so much detail, until there is nothing left of its power, we will be free of it. Lacan says that “the symbol manifests itself as the murder of the thing”. When we examine words, we often end up in a microscopic exploration of human misery. Kundera does it all the time. He even has a name for it: litost. “Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden insight into one’s own misery.” There is no better way to understand human misery than to look inside. But humanity keeps engaging in atrocities, ignoring completely individual misery. Our existence is determined by gain. The art of losing is no longer an art, although today it is more necessary than ever. (I read the news today. There was nothing new. What a waste of time, all for a handful of dollars…)

Even if music is emotion, our understanding of misery should be devoid of all emotion. Why would anyone be interested if one more obscure slave girl, in a small town no one has ever heard of, discovers inside her the howling of litost? One should engage only in a cold assessment of human history. An analyst of fact can read all of history in each one of us. We can read a man or a woman, as if we were reading all the poetry that has ever been written, all the battles that have ever been fought, all the blood that has ever been shed, all the causes that the bravest among us have sacrificed their lives for. This is not an issue of psychology. It is an issue of history.

Let’s take a word from the English dictionary: pity. There are so many reasons to pity ourselves. The first reason could be the realization that we are ridiculous, even in our most noble moments. There should logically follow the loss of all hope for redemption and transcendence. We are pigs without wings. We should merely acknowledge our pigness and go on snorting our sonatas of misery. But it is madness to pity pigs…

The second reason appears easily, like the patter of children’s feet. In the baroque living room of my heart, I see my children, playing half naked with a kitten. I see my father, long dead, struggling to uphold his own words: decency, honesty, integrity. Then I see all the men who ever held me in their arms, trying to tame the wild animal of my body. I see the years, fraying away like old clothes. I see a woman getting older, looking at her failing eyes in a gilded mirror. I see an inhuman hand playing with the sand of time, erasing, always erasing. In the end, the hand erases itself. The room for pity keeps getting smaller and smaller.

A worthy moment of pity may arise, when confronted with the intensity of a woman’s desire. Transforming her body into a monument of vulgarity at a man’s feet, she licks the dirt off his shoes. What type of mental construction could one stand on, in order to pity this woman for her desire? How high should the scaffold rise, for one to stand on and look at her from above? What heaven could be large enough to condemn her? Through the centuries comes the roaring of thousands of women, resonating fiercely in our book of pity, forcing us to close it with a hasty hand.

On this optimistic note, I end my writing jovially, in the expectation of a glorious day.

When you sense your menses approaching and the pain begins, you will lie down on the floor, at your Master’s feet, in order to remind him of your weakness. The Master will decide how long you will remain on the floor and what you will be doing in that time. If the Master is not available, you will tie your legs open to the legs of a chair and you will wait for your period for thirty minutes. This will help you conquer humility even if you are irritable because of your period.

A slave is always a slave; there are no exceptions or states of emergency.