The original sin

I distinctly remember my first Evil Deed. The difference between a mistake, even of the most devastating kind, and an Evil Deed, however minor, lies in the intent of the wrongdoer. An Evil Deed has harming another being as its distinct (or fuzzy, as the case may be) intent; a mistake, even one that will harm another being, doesn’t start out with this goal. I was four years old when I first set the goal and accomplished it. A glimpse of the innermost nature of Evil was revealed to me from behind the first veil. There were many more hiding it, as it turned out; the first veil proved to be the one that separates the world of innocent incompetence from the world of morally corrupt knowledge. Here’s how I found out.

It was my first day in kindergarten. I already knew how to read, but I didn’t yet know how to socialize, having been shielded from almost all contact with other kids up to that time. The multitude of child beings suddenly present in my life overwhelmed me. They were incomprehensible, I didn’t know the first thing about them. They were loud and moved about a lot, spinning all around me without inviting or involving me in their live merry-go-round. Some were bigger than me — most were — and some were smaller. The ones who were smaller proved stupid — I tried to make conversation with a few of them but I couldn’t understand their childish way to pronounce words. My Russian was impeccably correct by the time, save for the “r” sound which I later had to have a couple of lessons with a speech therapist to learn how to rrrrock and rrrroll between the tongue and the upper palate, which is how you make the Russian “r,” and my vocabulary was perhaps at least ten years ahead of its time. Some of the bigger kids seemed to have trouble with it though — a girl in a checkered dress approached me and asked me something, I gave her a thoroughly thought-through response, whereupon she made a sour face and pinched my upper arm with sudden determination and speed of an attacking cobra, and immediately ran to the teacher wailing, “The new girl hit me! The new girl beat me up!” The teacher made me stand in the corner facing the wall and “think of my behavior.” I was baffled, but I obeyed. I thought about my behavior and decided that I was the lowest of the low and therefore fair game for anyone who would have the time and inclination to do any kind of damage to me they could possibly dream up. My mood was in the gutter.

Then they let us all out to play. I wandered aimlessly in the yard, I didn’t know how to play and no one bothered noticing it. There was one other kid uninvolved in the general commotion, a boy bigger than me, who also wandered aimlessly, looking at the world through docile eyes of a lost puppy. I tried talking to him, and discovered that his power of speech was even feebler than that of the smaller kids. He was making indistinct sounds that conveyed no meaning whatsoever. I didn’t seem to have any use for his presence, so I abandoned him and got myself interested in a patch of uncultivated land in between some flower beds. I noticed a familiar plant there — a thistle, tall, with thorny leaves and clawed flower buds. I was no stranger to eating flowers, out of curiosity, but I’d never tired this one. With some reluctance, I carefully picked one of the buds and put it in my mouth. The little claws scratched my tongue, and I felt that biting into this thing would be a mistake. I was about to spit it out when the docile tongue-tied boy approached me again and indicated, with hand gestures clarifying his mumbling enough for me understand him, that he wanted whatever it was that I was eating.

In a flash of evil genius, my demolished mood and my emerging knowledge made a sinister, treacherous pact. For the first time in my life, I was about to trick another being into harm.

I carefully spat the thistle bud into my hand and hid it behind my back. “This is fruit,” I told the boy, “but I won’t give you any, I don’t have any for you, it’s all for me. It’s delicious. Yum, yum. You have to chew it hard and it’s all sweet and juicy inside. You wouldn’t know how to do it. You can’t chew hard enough.” The boy made sounds of protest and nodded his head energetically, indicating that he was, indeed, proficient enough in chewing, if not in human speech. His outstretched hand and his pleading eyes completed the message for him.

Into his pleading, hopeful eyes I looked, and into his outstretched hand I put the forbidden fruit of knowledge of good and evil.

He bit into the thistle bud with all his might. All the little claws must have embedded themselves into his gums so efficiently that his jaws were instantly locked shut — apparently he was no longer able to separate them. His face went red, his eyes exploded with helpless tears, and he started wailing through the clenched jaws. He ran to the teacher, bellowing, flailing his arms and pointing an accusatory finger at me. But didn’t I already know what would happen. Didn’t I already envision the plight of my accuser, didn’t I know he would be unable to explain my crime?.. Earlier, I got punished for a crime I didn’t commit. Now was my time to get off the hook with the crime I did commit. Justice, I was shaping you into what you shouldn’t have ever been, but I was only four and I knew no better than to learn via an innocent’s route of losing her innocence to the fool’s method of trial and error. (Which, as an aside, our science is so fond of even in its mature technological adulthood forever entangled in moral infancy.)

The boy spent the rest of the day picking the thistle claws from his gums, from between his teeth, probably from his tongue. Several times he approached me with mumbled accusations, complaints, and — I swear — attempts at understanding. Futile attempts, of course, I didn’t understand it myself.