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    Lefties
    Lefties
    Lefties
    Ebook98 pages1 hour

    Lefties

    By KARMEL ARBELAITZ

    ()

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    About this ebook

    WWII rages brutally across the oceans, and the city previously known as Berlin in Canada is shaken by a series of murders that seem to indicate a racial and political vendetta by a communist killer.



    Decades later, a seemingly harmless diary comes to light, revealing the true nature of the tragedy and the profound pain that prompted the real murderer to avenge the forgotten victims of the war.



    The hymns of allegiance of the killer elicit intensely conflicting feelings in the mind of the accidental reader, and yet, a firm devotion to correct the evils of war and sexism is instilled in his brain and in his conscience.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateOct 26, 2012
    ISBN9781475935721
    Lefties
    Author

    KARMEL ARBELAITZ

    Karmel Arbelaitz, an engineer with a deep humanistic vein, is a Colombian-Canadian with a passion for story telling. With two more books in progress, he favors subjects on women values, heroics, and their role in society. He lives with his wife Magnolia and their three children in Burlington, Ontario.

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      Book preview

      Lefties - KARMEL ARBELAITZ

      Copyright © 2012 by Karmel Arbelaitz.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

      iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

      iUniverse

      1663 Liberty Drive

      Bloomington, IN 47403

      www.iuniverse.com

      1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

      Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

      ISBN: 978-1-4759-3571-4 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4759-3572-1 (ebk)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2012912076

      iUniverse rev. date: 08/02/2012

      CONTENTS

      Chapter 1 My Grandmother

      Chapter 2 The Diary

      Chapter 3 The Newspapers

      Chapter 4 The Hate, The Indifference, and The Pain

      Chapter 5 The Second Bundle

      Chapter 6 What to do?

      I wrote this story from a special sunny place that I share with my wife, Magnolia, and my children: Santi, Danny, and Carly. That place is the bottom of my heart that they brighten up with the beauty of their presence and their infinite smiles.

      This one is for you.

      CHAPTER 1

      My Grandmother

      After leafing over the carefully drafted manuscript, the chilling effect of the written words quickly forced me to set aside the beauty of the almost artistic nature of the handwriting and the manicured arrangement of sentences and paragraphs on the ageing pages of the old diary.

      The book had been sitting in our basement since the day I received the untimely call of my grandmother’s death a few weeks before. It was the summer of 1999, and she had passed away in her sleep at the old age home where she had been submerged in the merciless fog of Alzheimer’s curse for the last nine years of her life. She was 85.

      She was born in 1914 in the city of Kitchener in Canada, when it was still called Berlin, and had married my grandfather two years before the beginning of World War II; they had one single daughter together in 1946, almost one year after the end of the conflict in Europe: my mother. He was twenty years her senior and had been trained by her own father as a medical aid for his tour of duty in the trenches of France during the last months of the Great War. The shrapnel of an artillery shell had seriously wounded him in a leg just days before the final cease fire, and after a few weeks in a French hospital, he was sent back to Canada where he finished his medical training while still recovering from his injuries; ultimately, he was left with a pronounced limp for the rest of his life which resulted in multiple rejections to join the forces when he tried to enlist for the second conflict.

      That was all I knew about them.

      My parents died in a car accident in 1969 when I was three years old, and I was raised by my father’s only brother and his wife. They became my parents, and their two girls became my sisters.

      I had lived a very happy life in the midst of my paternal family. My mom and my dad; my aunts and uncles; my grandparents; my sisters; and all my cousins formed a rowdy crowd that gifted my childhood a plethora of merry memories and fun times. It was only when I graduated from high school that my parents told me about my past and when I learned that I had a grandmother whom I had not seen since I was a toddler. They did not elaborate as to why she had disappeared from my life, but in 1990, when social services finally decided to transfer her to the facility where she finally died due to the severity of her dementia, the local government tracked me down as her only living relative.

      I visited her a few times during those nine years. The kind of upbringing that my parents gave me did not leave room for abandonment, and even though I loved my adoptive family as if it was my very own, I could just not walk away from the old woman.

      We never talked. I would just sit next to her for a few minutes and try to imagine where her empty stare was flying to with her thoughts. It was quite clear that she had been a very beautiful woman, endowed with a strong built and outstanding height. Her skin was porcelain white, and you could still find the honey brown shade of her eyes under that pervasive turbidity that stains the eyes of old people.

      It was after a few of my visits that I made a discovery that seemed trivial at the time, but it made me feel then specially attached to my newly discovered grandmother. Every so often, a sudden rush of agitation would come over her, and she would start shaking visibly upset; in quite a few of those occasions, she grabbed my arm with an unexpectedly tight grip. I did not make anything out of it until I noticed that, regardless of where I was sitting relative to her and even if she had to overreach, she would invariably use her left hand.

      My grandmother was left-handed, and she was definitely not oblivious to my presence next to her.

      I was a leftie too, and I had finally found an anchor to a side of me that had been adrift in the obscurity of my maternal ancestry. My dad was quite certain that my real mother was right handed, and there were no lefties on my paternal side of the family. That unique but seemingly trivial fact made me develop a strangely solid connection to the old woman and validated my commitment to keep myself abreast of her well-being.

      Every visit, I would talk to Angela, the head nurse, and would make sure that my grandmother was well taken care of and had everything she needed. It was Angela who called me with the news of her death and who gave me a delicately woven basket that I had never seen before with her personal belongings.

      We sat together that day in almost contemplative reverence as I opened the ornate hamper and removed its contents in some sort of somber ritual. That is where I found the diary.

      But what am I doing? Whoever is reading this must think that I am just rushing through the account of the horrifying series of events I had just found hidden in the seemingly harmless old brown leather book and keeping the readers from the wonderful richness of the masterful narrative of the mystery writers.

      I am just too eager to unload this burden off of my shoulders.

      I could have gone on to describe the intricate pattern and elaborate shape of the intriguing picnic size basket and try to colour it by meticulously painting an imaginary picture of it, but I will just say that I came to learn that it was over a hundred years old and had been made by Indian artisans using a rare indigenous vine and carefully lacquered in a terracotta shade. It had belonged to my great-grandfather, who had been a military doctor in the British army and served tours of duty in both India and South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century before settling down in Canada.

      It was the contents of the basket that caught my curiosity. Besides the diary, I found a full set of surgical instruments that were clearly

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