Free Letters from Yelena by Guy Mankowski Page B

felt so disgusting, trying to ignore the water in my bed, but strangely I also
felt a proud defiance, at being prepared to debase myself rather than give into her. It seemed righteous at the time.
    But this was very short-sighted of me. Yes, Bruna would have to suffer the inconvenience of washing my dirty sheets. But what I did not understand was that I had finally presented her with her
next opportunity. Any pride I felt at my self-restraint, for not getting up at night, was soon lost when Bruna discovered the sheets the next day with a hollow roar. I remember being surprised at
the ferocity with which she ordered me to come to my room. Her back was facing me as she angrily stripped the sheets. I could not see her expression, only guess at its twisted aggression.
    ‘Yelena. I cannot believe that you are too immature to even control your own body. This sort of behaviour is simply disgusting.’
    ‘I’m sorry Bruna.’
    ‘It is not me you should apologise to. I don’t go out to work every day to pay the bills, do I? It’s your father that does.’
    I knew better than to ask her not to show the sheets to my father.
    ‘He will just have to see what you have managed to do for himself,’ she said.
    I didn’t beg. I felt as if the air was sucked out of my body. My father was the one person in the world I wanted to impress, wanted to love me. I couldn’t bear to watch as Bruna took
the dirty bundle of sheets into his study and showed him just what his eldest daughter was capable of. My father, who had always struggled with the machinations of the female body at the best of
times, could only respond with a repulsed confusion. Nevertheless, he refrained from meeting my eye in the time that followed. His silence, and the complicit disgust within it, was far more hurtful
to me than anything Bruna might have said.
    If the mornings were poisonous, the nights under this new regime – where every word and action could be used to punish you – were far worse. Night after night was spent listening out
for the movement of Bruna’s body in the surrounding rooms, and far more rarely the shuffling of my father. My senses alert, I tried to reason a path through this unbearable atmosphere. Once
or twice, Bruna would come into the room even if we hadn’t made noise, and tears would begin to seep out of my eyes, though I forced myself to smile at her. Each time I could only guess at
what she was about to do. I was so terrified of wetting the bed again, and giving her a reason to punish us, that I started to do just that a few times a week. This would provoke Bruna’s
anger – an anger that seemed genuine rather than contrived – and cause her to humiliate me in front of my father. But this simply made me more anxious and therefore more likely to wet
myself again.
    Perhaps due to some innate survival instinct, Inessa began to distance herself from me. Sensing that she and my father were starting to develop a bond, on occasion Bruna would come into the room
and punish Inessa, or in the mornings hurt her, for some imagined crime or even worse for something I had done. Starved of sleep, and with no-one to turn to, the guilt started to well up inside me.
I had to watch my every step at home, but school was a different story. There, I was able at least to breathe without worrying how loud the breath was.
    At school we had two periods of free time, and during that period I was always especially quiet and withdrawn. I enjoyed drawing and writing during those classes where that was allowed; and in
the others I was careful to remain studious enough to get good grades. It was the short break before the end of the day that was unbearable because I was aware that soon I would be back home
again.
    One afternoon, the thought of returning home became too much for me. I thought my head was going to split open, or that I might faint. With a terrible sense of foreboding – because I knew
that any act of rebellion would cause my sister