Cult following, p.21
Cult Following, page 21
‘Brainwashing,’ I mouth the word. It’s interesting, my parents talk about it all the time. How do you wash a brain? Mine feels full, too full, not clean and washed. My finger pauses on an article describing the kids during the raids. A scene I have imagined so many times.
The police commissioner in charge of the operation was taken aback by the children’s condition. ‘They seemed like Martians, autistic,’ he said. ‘They were living in compartmented cells and answered questions like automatons. Whenever one of them tried to say something, another would look at him and he would fall silent, terrified.’
Autistic Martians, ha, Maria would love that.
I start to imagine what we do look like from the outside; I think about how we police ourselves, and each other, even the kids. It’s how it has always been. Do we really come across as Autistic Martians in comparison to kids ‘out there’, the kids outside the gate for example, who are given free money and spend their time shouting at us? Are we robotic versions of those children?
The shutters have flown up, I have been given a peek through a window from their world into ours; it’s in black and white in front of me. How they see us. My finger follows lines and lines of memorised answers in print on the page: ‘no abuse’, ‘never happened’, ‘happy lives’.
The black-and-white words that my parents spoke, words that I have been so proud of them for, for their quickness, their wit, their razor-sharp answers. I was so proud that they were chosen to protect our generation of kids. Even when I knew they were lying, they had lied to protect us.
They were protecting us, right?
I can’t put the book down, I can’t stop my finger racing through the articles, each one revealing more. I speed through a journalist talking about confiscated videos with sexual content: ‘There are amateur videos said to be taken by members of a religious sect that calls itself the Family of Love. The video tapes, shown by television stations in Argentina, depict nude girls, some no older than eight, dancing in provocative poses. Officials in Argentina say pornographic videos and literature were confiscated in raids on seven homes run by the sect. Court sources say some of the tapes depict sex between children and adults, one between a father and daughter.’
I didn’t know that they confiscated anything in the raids. My parents hadn’t told us anything about this. But, as I read, a memory rushes front and centre from South Africa, of me as a five-year-old watching these films that had been made for Moses David by the young girls. We were told they were beautiful, expressions of love. I remember the day some of the Aunties and young girls filmed them in our home. We weren’t allowed to walk past a certain window, in case we were ‘in the background’. I could hear the music playing loud from the room that the camera was set up in. Me and Joel found a spot to watch. I could just about see their outlines through the net curtains. They stripped off their clothes erotically, slowly, gyrating to the music. Joel and I mimicked the dancing from our hidden spot, rubbing ourselves mockingly and laughing silently.
The title on the next page reads:
DAVID BERG ABUSES OWN GRANDDAUGHTER
‘. . . His granddaughter has accused him of starting sexual practices with her when she was five . . .’
I have lived every day of my breathing life in this group and even for me, with my knowledge from the inside of this world, to read this feels shocking. It’s not news to me, but I am reading it in a new way. Like seeing your face reflected in a mirror from behind, your features are reversed. You have seen your face one way your whole life, and now you look at it and you don’t recognise it, everything seems to slip off sideways. I had read Moses David’s writings about his sexual fantasies with his granddaughter Mene, but somehow this knowledge just faded into the full tapestry of what we experienced and were taught. Just a small part of it. It didn’t even stand out. Now these words leap off the page and I feel a little sick, sick that it only registers as truly messed-up when I read it in this dim, beige office from a book of clippings.
I turn the page again. My hand shakes, wondering what I’ll see on the other side. My sharp intake of breath cuts through the dim room. A photo screams from the centre. It’s a few years old, black and white and grainy, but it’s definitely me. I touch the edge of it and a grey smudge appears on my fingertip, revealing just how real it is, so real it leaps off the page and puts a mark on me. It was taken on the day we went to London for the demonstrations. I stand outside the Argentine Embassy, wearing that denim jacket they gave me that I loved so much, my childish face contorted from shouting with raw enthusiasm.
I didn’t realise that I looked like that. My hair flies out of its low ponytail, frizz frames my face. I look so much smaller than the people around me. Smaller than I imagined. I look like a child. I didn’t feel like one on the day that this was taken – I felt grown-up, I’ve felt like an adult for years.
I don’t recognise myself.
The headline reads, ‘CHILDREN OF GOD FIGHT BACK’.
In my tiny, outstretched arms, like a shepherd’s staff, is a placard painted with large words by my amateur brush.
It reads, ‘Let our Children Go’.
CHAPTER 13
Forgive Nothing: 16 Years After
My parents have gone.
My eyes focus on the rug in the middle of the floor. Plants are woven into the tapestry, their leaves reaching out to each other. I stare so hard they flicker, start to move towards each other, like shivering, trembling arms, reaching for comfort, but they can’t touch, they are just a little out of reach.
I sit in my living room in London. I’ve been back from the trip for six months, almost settled back into London life. But the last 24 hours have changed everything.
I have just interviewed my parents.
I feel nothing. I don’t feel angry, I don’t feel sad.
I am numb.
‘Here you go . . .’ Paz walks in with a glass of water. I have known him for eight years. He is a producer, he is my sounding board, he is a good friend. And perhaps he thought that he would be walking into a victory party. And here I am almost catatonic.
‘Thanks’ – the word dries my mouth out as I say it.
Yesterday, I was meant to fly back out to the States, but the group I was going to stay with cancelled my visit. Disappointed, confused, I sat in my kitchen, wondering what my next move should be. And as I sat there, a call came through from an unknown number. It was my dad. We are in the UK and we want to see you. Was this a sign? Was this supposed to be my next move? Maybe it was all along.
To go back to the source.
Now, just half an hour after they have left, I am shutting down. Everything is shrinking, like what happened in this room happened at the end of a tunnel, or a telescope pointed the wrong way around. In a tiny peephole. My brain is trying to protect itself, minimise the feelings of shame and failure that are on the periphery, their nasty shadows creeping in from the corners.
Everyone told me that meeting up with my parents was going to be hard.
Everyone told me facing them after all these years would mess up my brain.
Everyone said it would throw me back a step or two.
Be careful.
But the stories I told myself, about my strength and capability, were louder than ‘everyone else’. All I needed to do was get them on camera. Everything else I could take care of. I am an experienced interviewer – they can’t affect me now like they did when I was a kid.
‘So . . .? Did you give them hell?’ Paz asks.
I wonder if he’s joking.
I take a gulp of water. ‘I don’t think so, I don’t know,’ I tell him, confused.
‘Shall I have a look?’ he says, walking towards the camera still sitting in its tripod, the witness in the room, still pointing at the couch they sat on.
‘No, no, no,’ I say.
Fuck. It’s that bad.
I want to believe that what just happened didn’t happen. If Paz watches it, it will confirm that it did.
Paz looks at me, worried. ‘OK, OK . . . I won’t watch. You need a stronger drink than that. What else you got here?’
My voice comes out thin and weak. ‘I really thought I would feel different from this. Like a release maybe . . . I feel gross.’
I can still smell their presence, even their clothes, the Old Spice my dad wears, and yet, did it really happen?
It did.
*
My mom and dad sat on my couch, two figures lit up with a warm glow from fairy lights on the floor. Mom was wearing a long skirt and white top, Dad in a button-up shirt and cardigan. They both look old. Art and photographs cover every surface. There is barely an empty space on the walls and floors in this tiny living room, the bits and bobs I have around that make ‘my home’.
It’s weird to have them sitting among my things.
I’d set up for the interview. Fixing up my tripods, checking my memory cards and sound equipment. My dad still sports his moustache, but his hair is now fully grey. Mom’s hair that has always been black is now blonde – strange to see her like this, it’s hard to connect her with the mom I had growing up.
It’s probably a maintenance thing, to hide the age coming through.
They talk about the diet they are on at the moment – ‘The Hollywood Diet’. I hear my dad say the words ‘Carb Cycling’. Bizarre that two cultists should care enough about their weight to do a fad diet with the word ‘Hollywood’ in it. It seems carnal, worldly, not very godly.
Plain weird, I think.
‘I’ll sit there, and you two sit here,’ I say to no one in particular, anxiously fiddling with the tech around the room.
‘Are you using one camera or two?’ my dad said in an authoritative voice.
I take a step towards them, trying to take up some space and move into ‘filmmaker’ mode.
‘There’ll be things that we’ll talk about in this interview that will be relevant to you and things that are going to be more relevant to other people.’ I looked at them among the fairy lights, the portrait I painted of my grandma, the photographs of years of life I have had without them. How would I approach the list of injustices from my childhood, that in this room, seem a lifetime ago? How would I balance the needs of the kid from then, and the adult I am today?
As I finished setting up, I heard myself say, ‘That’s lovely!’ Like a 1950s housewife bringing out a steaming hot pie for her guests, rather than a woman about to confront her parents. I sat down opposite them and put a gentle foot forward.
‘I suppose a good place to start is asking you how much you know about this film that I’m making?’ I say.
My mom straightens her top, smiles and says, ‘Well, we don’t know very much about it. We know that you’ve been visiting some religious communities, but we’d really love to hear more details. Exactly which ones you’ve been to and what it was like? What was your experience there?’
I answer, listing groups and dates, and then realise that the interview has been turned around on me. I am describing the Twelve Tribes, giving them a brief history of Ananda, rambling on autopilot. I try to turn it around to us: ‘My focus has been the children. The questions I’ve been asking families are all around the idea of raising your kids in groups, where you don’t necessarily know what the outcome will be, if you know what I mean.’
Do I think I’m being clever?
It’s a weak start.
My mom smiled sweetly and said, ‘It does make sense but I think you will find that the adults there certainly do know how it’s going to turn out. They believe that the children will stay pure and separate from the world. That’s what their hope is, that’s what their desire is, that’s the end result they want. So, they’re probably very disappointed if their kids start leaving and it’s not perhaps what they expected in the beginning at all. I think they probably want their families to stay together, within the group.’
They. The children. Them. The group.
We skirt around our history, using other people’s stories to talk about our own, without ‘outing’ ourselves, like a thinly veiled ‘asking for a friend’. Disconnected, once, twice removed.
‘Yeah,’ I continue. ‘It’s a complicated one, because obviously for me . . . I’ve got . . . you know . . . We’ve got our huge family and we’ve got our own history, and we’re kind of dealing with the fallout of this situation now.’ Where am I going with this? I’m not asking about their culpability, or even talking about their accountability as the only people in ‘our family’ who held any power.
Then, again, I water down the point by talking about ‘other people’ – the Twelve Tribes.
‘So, I was talking to families who had young kids and the parents are very sure that these kids aren’t going to leave. More than likely it’s because they haven’t hit puberty yet and they haven’t started to become rebellious. And while our story isn’t everyone’s story, I’m a bit like, “Well, they might stay. But prepare for the eventuality of them leaving as well.”’
‘I think I agree with you,’ Mom says.
Does she?
‘I think we had unrealistic expectations and they probably do as well. Because you feel, as an adult, that you’ve found something so wonderful that you want to give your life to. So, you want your children to do the same.’
How normal this all sounds – ‘something so wonderful’ – like a calling, like getting into yoga, or clean living, maybe insisting your kids are vegetarian. It’s plain and simple. As she says it, I can feel myself getting pulled into their version of our history.
‘Everyone has to make their own choices,’ she continues, ‘and we were hoping that the children would make the same choice as us. Everyone has to find their own faith, whatever that is. We ourselves – in the time period we’re talking about, 1968, 1971, when we first joined – we hated the fact that we were supposed to fit in a mould. And yet, we were trying to do that ourselves, with our own children. And why?’
My dad answers her question. ‘Because we thought we had a better mould.’ He takes a long pause. As if he has a bigger audience than the one in this room. Maybe it’s the audience in the camera he is talking to. ‘I look at my parents and their motivation was, be financially secure. Have a nice marriage. Have a house. Have a car. And that your kids would carry that on, but do a bit better than you did. And my motivation was that I wanted to make the world a better place. And in the same way, I saw my children’s lives being better than my own. It was because they would fulfil that mission better than I did, of making the world a better place.’
Again. It all seems so simple. We lived that life to make the world a better place. Everything that happened to us kids was with that motivation.
And now that he has the floor, he starts to divert with histories of other religions and with stories of other people’s families, of nuns who live on the west side of Hyde Park, of Muslim ways of life. He talks for a full 20 minutes while I sit there silent.
What the fuck is going on?
We dance around each other, in a world that isn’t real, where no one speaks the truth, where everything is a different colour or shade than it should be, a picture made up of so many untruths that it creates a totally different scene – but it happens piece by piece so you don’t notice till you stand back and think, What the hell is that?
I get caught up in their revision of the truth, so much so that my own memories seem like the lies, my past seems unreal. Would these two old people sitting in my flat in London actually join a cult? Would they have let those things happen to us, to me? My very real past becomes more blurred with every word. It’s a thick heavy mist that I have to fight my way out of.
I choke on the bullshit, theirs and my own. I need to pull this back into some kind of truth. I talk about some kids I know from the Twelve Tribes, whose dad left for them and how that made me feel. That he was the hero I dreamed of as a child, and that his wife, Derusha, didn’t leave with them. I asked Derusha, as she sat there, childless, if she would do anything differently and she had said, ‘No.’ I tell my parents, ‘I find it difficult to understand a person that wouldn’t do anything differently, if that makes sense.’
Is this really my attempt at asking if they have any regrets? Can’t I do better than this?
I have done, I know I can – but not with them, it seems.
My mom says, ‘There’s things that we definitely would have done differently and that we really regret.’
I ask, ‘When I was younger, did you agree with the decisions that were being made about us at that time?’ I know what I’m talking about, they know what I’m talking about, but no one comes out and says it.
Mom says, ‘Things were only bad for one year.’
They have convinced themselves and are now trying to convince me.
My dad says, ‘There were some decisions we didn’t agree with, but then you have to make a choice, “Well, do I disagree with this enough that I’m prepared to walk?” Am I prepared to think, “OK, I don’t necessarily agree but maybe other people know better than I do?”’
I know he knows what I’m talking about because he says, ‘They tried it out in the Philippines and they told us it worked, so we just got on with it.’
What they ‘just got on with’ was the Victor Camps. Beating their own kids. The silence restrictions.
I need to push them. Shout. Scream. But, somehow, they still have a power over me that reduces me to being a little girl.
And what did that little girl do to survive? She was quiet. She tried to please them because she knew the transactional nature of their love, she had to earn it. She knew that to be good and keep quiet was to have a kind of safeness. Be invisible.
And here I am, slipping into that role.
We are circling the point, getting closer to the truth, but on the edge of it, my mom starts to cry. I watch her, wet-eyed, quivering chin, and I feel a hollowness to the tears. Like watching someone emulating emotion and perhaps creating a diversion.
