Pretty Sascha
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Pretty Sascha was born to a pretty man and his pretty wife – realistically, it was inevitable that the child would be as luminous as the both of them. His father had feared just that – the burden of beauty that would inevitably fall on the youth of the boy who would be one of only two. The son born after pretty Sascha was lucky; somehow, he was ugly. His mother would bemoan sometimes that pretty Sascha had taken the burden of beauty on for the both of them; she believed that he had chosen to be beautiful as a fetus that didn’t want his brother to have the same defect and had sucked all of the loveliness that her womb would ever offer. Pretty Sascha refused to believe this. Not only was it a foolish superstition, but he refused to believe that he would have chosen that cross, even as a remarkably gifted and somehow cognoscente fetus. Pretty Sascha blamed fate, and to support that conviction, he offered the first in a long line of ironies that, like beauty, would never stop harassing him – When his father, a recent Russian immigrant, had held his already lovely baby boy, he had named him what he considered the toughest, manliest name he knew. His father didn’t know that the name he picked was used as a cute, popular name for little girls, and that pretty Sascha’s classmates would always consider him a boy that was named like a girl, versus singling out the female Sascha’s as girls that had been named like boys. His last name was Fyodorov, and it wasn’t particularly ironic at all.
Pretty Sascha’s loveliness was apparent very early on. When they had dressed him in the white gown that they baptize little babies in, and taken him to the church to be consecrated to the God who had cursed him, everyone had marveled at him like a little gem that had been polished to a blinding shine. Pretty Sascha, an innocent babe, had just enjoyed the attention that his loveliness got him, and had squirmed and raised his fat little arms and smiled with his tiny bow mouth. Pretty Sascha didn’t remember it, but when the tale was told to him, he half jokingly called it the beginning of the end. When pretty Sascha’s brother was born, a year and a half later, and had exited the womb ugly and short and wrinkled like a tiny old man, and had proceeded to grow into an increasingly stout and average toddler, his parents had heaved a sigh of relief. His father would always pat the boy’s head and make sure he understood how selfless pretty Sascha had been, to be born lovely enough for the both of them. Their father subscribed to his wife’s superstition, but the second son, like his brother, did not. His name was ugly Mikhail, and he just knew that his father loved his ugliness, that his father felt like it gave ugly Mikhail a chance. It was only later, when ugly Mikhail was a young man, and brokenhearted, that he wished he had been as pretty as pretty Sascha, but he never said it, as he knew that his father would scold him for not appreciating the gift of ugliness. Ugly Mikhail could see how his father looked at his plainness with envy; how it radiated off of him when he had a drink in his hand…
Their father, that is, pretty Sascha and ugly Mikhail’s father, had lived in a fierce country in the middle of a period characterized by unrest and war. He had been as pretty as his son would be; except, his curls where the color of copper wire and he had never been told it was a bad to be gorgeous; he was petite and bright and pretty, and it took him from a small village to the big city. As a young man, a student at a conservatory where he studied the cello, he wore his hair long and protested in St. Petersburg, fiercely and fearlessly shouting FREEDOM at the top of his rebellious lungs; people where moved by his beauty and his conviction; his beauty made him well loved and tended to and listened to. His rich, talented friends always extolled him not to risk himself; protesting what would never change; they warned him to keep complacent, to secure his future. Their father, however, was young and would have no part of inaction; his copper curls and upraised fist became synonymous with the brewing revolution, and he was a minor local celebrity.
One night, as he walked the streets in search of booze and women, a group of off duty police in search of the same thing stopped him. They recognized him from the protest, and they wanted to ruin his loveliness; they wanted to posses and soil and shit on it, so they drunkenly molested and raped him until he stopped moving. One of the men had said that he was prettier then any woman they could have found; they called him sexy and fondled his flat chest and penetrated him with their hatred over and over again; they raped him with their anger and their pain and their own hopelessness until he couldn’t walk. And then, zipping their trousers up and leaving him bleeding and destroyed in that alleyway, they hoped that their feelings would die with him. Though no one would ever know, the men who raped their father had blamed anger and inebriation when they had become sober and had to justify raping a young man that, despite having differing political views, still had been a man. The blamed drunkenness, stupidity, anger and the ferocity that they where forced to live with. They blamed society and communism; they blamed war and their upbringing and their military training. They would all revisit that night again several times in their lives; they would drink until they stopped remembering and slip into sleep. They blamed themselves.
But, he didn’t die. Someone, one of his fans or just a good hearted Samaritan, must have found him and taken mercy on him, because he woke up in a hospital. The first woman he saw was the woman who would be pretty Sascha and ugly Mikhail’s mother some day; he asked her to marry him before he left the hospital, and she had accepted. She married him because she was certain that a man as pretty as him would never marry a woman for vanity; it didn’t hurt that he was skilled and educated and famous. Their mother came from simple, hard working people and she could give him the selfless, slavish care he would always need. She also, quietly, loved his loveliness, despite the way he cursed it; she loved him too much to tell him. He certainly would have left her; and so she resented loveliness, too.(04)
This was the conflict that pretty Sascha and ugly Mikhail where born into. Their father, unlike the police who blamed themselves, always blamed his own loveliness.
Loveliness, he would say to his sons, was like being born with a target painted on your forehead. Loveliness was like being convicted of being a million things that contradicted themselves and always having to convince people they did not apply. He never told his boy’s why he hated loveliness; and neither did their mother. He would just blame loveliness, over and over again.
And this is how the loveliest boy on earth learned to hate his beauty.
This entire sad legacy aside, pretty Sascha’s life was not unbearable. He grew athletic and excelled at soccer; the coach always accused him of being born to play the game, and this made his father very proud, as he valued ‘macho’ in his beauty cursed son very much. Ugly Mikhail showed no inclination for sports, and so he played the guitar; he felt things for the metal strings and amplifier that he knew he would never get from the outdated hollow of his father’s cello. Neither boy excelled at classroom studies.
Sascha’s beauty, the philosophy and theory and fear of his sons loveliness, consumed him. Sometimes, when he would sit and drink and reminisce about his own detested prettiness, he would get sucked into frustrated mulling over the trials he was sure Sascha would inevitably face. Their father had a twisted view of the world; his entire life and value system had been reset and reformed after the ugly thing that happened in that alley way.
Pretty Sascha and ugly Mikhail where well aware of how their father felt about the way they looked; he always attached their attractiveness as a sort of prefix, if he used their first names at all. Everyone else, even their mother, called them Sasch and Mike, names that where less foreign and easier to equate with them; all American boys, the athlete and the rock star. (5)
And where they lived, an intellectual suburb where all boys where treated delicately and more humanely then most other places, and they where well fed and well loved, pretty Sascha was not as alone in his loveliness as his father had been. For those few years that he pushed through puberty, pretty Sascha was almost unremarkable. When his mother would point this out to his father, he would just shake his head. “I was average for a little while, too.” He would tell her, “and I know how loveliness will catch up to him.” If pretty Sascha was around, his father would gesture at him accusingly, warning in that seldom used mother tongue, “The best thing you could do for yourself, pretty, is to cut your face off now and burn your skin until it’s like leather. That’s the only reprieve, pretty. Make yourself ugly for loveliness does it for you.” He never said these sorts of things to ugly Mikhail, though, he said something else: “Ugly, you are so blessed. You are ugly like my father and my mother and loveliness had passed you over. No one will ever love you for your loveliness.” This was another irony in the funny story of the pretty Sascha; that the same beauty that had blessed their father when he was young; the same beauty that had sent him to cities and silently enchanted his mother was now considered a curse.
It was also ironic that ugly Mikhail, for his dishwater blonde hair and his dull, phlegmatic skin, was considered much luckier then his lovely brother.
When pretty Sascha turned 17, loveliness caught up to him and the world held its breath in adoration. He, a flower, had opened up fully, and the world buzzed with excitement. His loveliness was welcomed and threatening and magnificent. Pretty Sascha couldn’t go anywhere without being treated well; he was so lovely that people just wanted to be near him; they were bumblebees desperately competing for the pollination of his loveliness. Pretty Sascha was so beautiful that his brother, quietly involved with a girl who played keyboards in his band, found himself entranced with his loveliness and frightened of it. Now, more then ever (though it had always been wondered), people where startled at the contrast between them and confused by it. How could the (06) prettiest boy in the world have such an ugly brother? They started to tell their mother’s strange, superstitious story and people would accept it for lack of a better explanation --They both began to understand their father’s fears. The brothers saw first hand the preternatural prettiness that pretty Sascha had been gifted; they didn’t, however, understand that it truly was a curse.
The third irony, the killer irony, was this: ugly Mikhail’s girlfriend, the first and last one to look past his ugliness, was in love with pretty Sascha; captured by his loveliness and mesmerized by his radiating beauty. This girl that ugly Mikhail had given his whole heart to; this girl that had loved him, too, was suddenly gone; she said, “Mike, I’m in love with your brother. I’m sorry, but he’s so…beautiful. He’s so…illuminating. I really don’t know, exactly, but you’ve seen it, too, haven’t you? The way he just shines?”
There where more words, but ugly Mikhail couldn’t listen; he shut himself away, and his love offered her body and devotion to his brother in ways she, even after years, never had to ugly Mikhail. Pretty Sascha turned her down, and she, wounded and angry, told everyone that pretty Sascha was gay. “Have you ever seen him with a girl?” she would say, and, filled with jealousy and rejected lust, boys and girls would agree with her. He stopped playing soccer because boy’s groped him in the locker room; though they didn’t know it, they wanted the same thing that the men who had raped pretty Sascha’s father had wanted; to soil and piss on and spit on and ruin the beauty that pretty Sascha had been unfairly gifted with. As pretty Sascha grew lovelier and prettier and more beautiful, his brother’s sadness evolved into a cold, hateful jealousy. Ugly Mikhail hated his father’s legacy and he wished that loveliness had touched them both. He felt that pretty Sascha had stolen the only loveliness he had ever known from him, in the form of his girlfriend, and deserved anything that he got. When people asked ugly Mikhail about his lovely brother’s sexuality, he would shrug and he would tell them that he didn’t know. Sometimes, if ugly Mikhail was feeling particularly spiteful, he would tell them it was true.
Their father heard this, and he screamed at ugly Mikhail until he was red in the face; he slapped his ugly son and he scolded him for his selfishness and said nasty things about the girl who had left him in pursuit of his pretty brother. Didn’t he know, his father demanded, what men would do the pretty Sascha if they could only call him a fag? Didn’t ugly Mikhail know that peril he had put his brother in? Disgusted and intoxicated with rage and fulfilled fear, his father, beauty’s victim, threw ugly Mikhail out – he saw, in his callous son’s face, those men who had harmed him so long ago.
Ugly Mikhail could not have known this, and had gone in search of pretty Sascha; a knife clenched in his hand and stuffed in his pocket. He was going to, filled with pain and anger, scar up pretty Sascha and make him as ugly as his father had always wanted; he would make him un-lovely and remove the curse and make them equals again. He would, in making his brother ugly, cleanse himself of whatever crime his father blamed him of; even if he was unsure of what it was.
Ugly Mikhail felt the steely sheen of his hatred and his resolve deep in his heart and he calmly set forth. He would be the ugliness that killed loveliness, he decided, consumed with his ugly intent.(8)
Fate, however, disagreed with ugly Mikhail. He came upon his brother in a clearing; an undeveloped lot behind their house that was filled with tree’s and grass and weeds. The grass, un-mowed for years, was high around pretty Sascha; the sun was golden and bright, and it was kissing and caressing not pretty Sascha, but this boy who had suddenly, in this moment, become most lovely Sascha. In the presence of beauty unfurled and unguarded, the grass seemed to reach up to him and the sun reached down; the entire world wanted to be as close to most lovely Sascha as possible. Ugly Mikhail saw this and he realized it all perfectly; the world ceased to exist outside of the two of them, and the awe that ugly Mikhail felt was only thwarted by the hatred that filled his heart. Most lovely Sascha turned an eye to his intruding brother and he went suddenly cold. Most lovely Sascha rose to his feet and the grass wept (08) in his absence, the sun grew warmer and the birds sang in attempts to make most lovely Sascha smile. He had heard what his brother said; earlier, when a group of boys and girls filled with envy and malice had confronted him and cursed him and tried to tear his beauty down with hate, they had used ugly Mikhail’s name. He accused ugly Mikhail the same way that their father had; of disloyalty and stupidity and pettiness. Ugly Mikhail, still wounded from earlier, screamed and accused him back – “YOU stole love from me!” Yelled ugly Mikhail, “YOU always will! I will never escape my ugliness like you have been enveloped in loveliness!” most lovely Sascha had yelled back – “YOU can have it!” and, “YOU will always have normalcy! I will never escape our father’s curse!” and both of them meant it.
Consumed with pain, ugly Mikhail took the knife and he tried to take most lovely Sascha’s loveliness. Overcome with disbelief, most lovely thought that ugly meant to kill him, and so took his brothers throat in his hands and he wrung the life out of him; he suffocated him and crushed his throat with his athletic hands.
Ugly Mikhail was simply Mikhail in death; the ugliness had only been a reflection of most lovely Sascha’s beauty, and no longer on the level of consciousness, he became more important then their father’s strict understanding of physical attraction. In death, most lovely Sascha saw, Mikhail was a guitarist and a boy and a past and an achievement outside of ugliness or loveliness.
Overcome with envy that his brother, so easily, escaped the curse of their father’s defining pain, most lovely Sascha took the knife that his brother had pulled on him and thrust it into his stomach like a dishonored samurai. This is how ugliness killed loveliness, this was the final irony of his short life, and as most lovely Sascha bled out; and the grass wilted and the birds stopped singing and the sun hid. As the life drained from him, he was no longer the loveliest boy in the world and this suited him, just fine.
