1   BEWILDERING SURPRISE

Gábor and Helena Fabien had intended to spend a few days visiting some friends and relatives in the country before their baby was due. However, it seemed the baby was in a hurry, and it surprised them by arriving a full two weeks early. The sun had risen only a moment before, casting a pink sky like a blanket over the village and the featureless, flat countryside, the legendary Hungarian Puszta, akin to the North American Plains or the Pampas in South America.

The buildings bathed in the soft colors of the morning sun and everything looked peaceful. Around the village were some tall, slender trees and pasture for cattle, but mainly horses. Gábor had no eyes for any of it; he focused on Helena's face and asked her how she was. She gritted her teeth in response, and when the pain eased, she smiled at him bravely and told him she loved him in spite of it all. The husband, holding the hand of his exceptionally stunning wife, felt somewhat guilty watching her suffering through the birth, and wished he could bear her pain instead.

Unshaven and his hair messy, he looked worse than his wife did. She squeezed his hand when the contractions came and hissed through her teeth, but did not cry out as they had all expected. The midwife and the doctor stepped outside for a smoke every twenty minutes or so and talked with some of the relatives and friends gathered to give moral support to the new parents.

An older gentleman appeared particularly anxious; it was to be his first grandchild. He badgered the doctor to speed up the delivery. He claimed he wouldn't live forever, and time was of the essence.

By nine o'clock in the morning, a healthy baby boy emerged, bloody, and coated with a greasy substance. With a cry of defiance, he announced his presence to the mother and to the world. Nothing special about this, it happens all the time and everywhere. But in this case, though it wasn't apparent yet, something was very different.

The new parents decided on the name Leo, because of his astrological sign. How fitting his name was, would become clear much later. The following week, during Leo's examination and check-up, doctors found nothing unusual in spite of his early arrival, and the proud family returned to their home in Budapest. Helena recovered very rapidly from childbirth and now conducted her physiotherapeutic consultations from home, and Gábor continued his regular work as life skills counsellor and teaching his classes of martial arts.

Leo was a normal, happy baby and he seemed to grow unusually quick, which pleased his parents, but they had a hard time making him walk upright; he preferred to be on his pudgy hands and feet. Alert and agile he moved quickly, with a superb sense of balance, but mainly on all four limbs. About a year later, however, they noticed disturbing changes in Leo. His development was no longer normal; his facial features and body structure changed, and his tailbone grew longer. The Fabien's consulted their house doctor, Dr. Kovásc in Budapest; he took some blood samples, shook his head at the results, and said he couldn't make much sense of them. He asked Helena and Gábor to wait and see what would develop over time.

Leo grew rapidly as time went by, and the changes became more evident; he had been hairless when he was born, with the exception of his head, like most babies, but at one year old, a fine fur covered his face and body. Not much later, his entire body was furry and his overall appearance resembled a cat more than a human, and his tail had grown to a length of two hand spans.

The parents sought a way to reverse what was happening and consulted professional help under strict secrecy. Helena spoke with an old medical doctor she met once at a professional conference in Vienna whom she thought she could trust. When the doctor saw Leo, he looked peculiarly at Helena and said: "You need to see a vet with him. I'm a doctor, not a veterinarian."

"Well, I guess you're too calcified to upgrade now," she fumed and left the office with Leo, slamming the door on the way out.

That night, Helena had a difficult conversation with Gábor. They ended up in tears and decided to wait until things became clearer about the cause of Leo's disfigurement before having any more children. To at least sidestep the hurtful small-minded gossip and judgments of others, they decided to make a fresh start amongst potentially more broad-minded people.

When Leo was two and a half, the family moved to Canada's western Sunshine Coast and lived in a trailer while constructing a house near Sargeant Bay, a place known for its exceptional beauty and serenity. With relatively easy access to West Vancouver, Gábor opened his own clinic as a massage therapist, mental health consultant, and life coach counsellor, and additionally, three nights of the week he taught martial arts in a private school, similar to what he did in Hungary. In association, but independent from him, Helena ran an advisory clinic in naturopathy and physiotherapeutic consultations as she did in Hungary, but from home, so she could look after Leo, continuing her line of work in their new environment now in Canada.

She loved Gábor's calm and centered, authentic being, and the way he could make her laugh. He was also intelligent and a very imaginative lover. Gábor did not look his age unless one looked into his eyes. A mix of hazel and green, they changed with his mood, and there was a depth to them that spoke of many lifetimes of experience and wisdom.

Helena was a woman that knew what she wanted. Beautiful, sexual, and autonomous, Gábor loved her active lifestyle, her open, quick and outspoken mind, and her practical, intuitive, and insightful methods in anything she did. Both of them were a perfect match for each other, in mentality and character.

Back then, when they met, he appeared to be about thirty-six or thirty-seven, and then she found out he was forty-three. Now he looked more like forty-five plus. Crow's feet around his eyes and a few furrows on his forehead and a steep crease between them when he was thinking hard didn't diminish his handsome appearance. He had all his hair, but it had turned salt and pepper lately. His calm demeanour elicited trust and generally affected women in a way that made them want to be around him. However, an impenetrable wall seemed to surround him, and so far, Helena was the only one who'd seen what he really was like, and he allowed her in… no, he'd invited her in although not without some serious coaxing.  She accepted his invitation and had never looked back since, and a little mystery just made him more interesting.

 When the family left Hungary, they sold all of their possessions and invested the money in a property for sale privately at a very reasonable price. With the help of Ivan, a Russian immigrant, they built their own two-story house with a separate basement studio that was also a dojo for their personal use. It was a modest home set on a slight hill overlooking the waters of Georgia Straight with the Trail Islands about three kilometers to the southeast. Solar panels covered the entire roof of the house, supplemented by two wind generators during low sun. Water supply to the house was of excellent quality and purity from a fast flowing creek nearby. The house was completely off the power grid and independent from the municipality.

A long, curved driveway and the slope of the hill behind it rendered the house invisible from the main road. It was considered one of the best-designed residential houses in British Columbia. Architects and house builders asked to see the house during construction and some of the neighbours dropped in for a visit, very much to the family's dislike because they wanted to keep themselves in seclusion to protect Leo and avoid gossip. The occasional visitor was Ivan and once an elderly veterinarian by the name Wilson because the family wanted their privacy. Ivan respected that and didn't intrude. Eventually, the visitors ebbed away. Only one thing struck him as odd. He knew, they had a child, but were reluctant to allow him to see it. There was always a reason why he couldn't.

During the construction, he had become a trusted friend and wondered why they always bundled and moved the child out of the way and into the small camper when he was around. He thought it peculiar, said nothing, but he was curious. After completion of the house, he visited occasionally, but rarely saw the child, and on those rare occasions when he did, he caught only glimpses of the kid as Helena whisked him away. He had the impression their child perhaps had Down's syndrome judging by the set of the eyes he had seen once and the ungainly waddle he displayed. He also grew very fast. All that would explain his parent's reclusive and seemingly antisocial behaviour towards strangers, although not so much towards him, with the exception about their youngster.

In the beginning, when Ivan had offered his assistance to Helena's husband, Gábor wasn't outgoing or overly pleased about his offer to give him a hand, but his wife convinced him that Ivan's assistance would give her more time to spend with Leo and he agreed.

Ivan thought perhaps her husband just guarded his wife like a jealous man would, but in just in a few days' time Gábor's reserved attitude changed and Ivan became a close friend. Supposing Gábor's initially withdrawn attitude must have had other reasons for why he didn't engage in personal conversations, especially about his son, Ivan stopped asking questions about Leo. As a matter of fact, he forgot more or less to ask about Leo because he rarely caught sight of him. Leo was a non-entity.

While the construction was in progress it was only he, Gábor, and Helena on the site and they made a good team. The work went smoothly and without major glitches. In the early stages and throughout the construction Helena disappeared regularly and performed some lengthy, mysterious activities in the trailer where the couple spent their nights, and Ivan knew she was cooking or preparing snacks, but the amount of food she bought for those occasions didn't match their consumption. It seemed she shopped for a small army, but fed only three adults and a baby.

He didn't know Helena dedicated those hours to make Leo speak, to hear him say the words any mother loved to hear, Mama, but all she got was ‘ma-mao'. Desperately, she wanted to believe he was intelligent; his eyes looked attentively at her in those times and on occasions Leo seemed to reply to her requests. When she pointed at something, his eyes followed her aim and Helena was certain he understood, but couldn't convince her husband that it could be a sign of intelligence. He thought Leo to be an exceptionally intelligent animal, but not a sentient being. To him the sounds Leo made were nothing more than pitiful attempts to mimic Helena like a parrot. But those weren’t words, only unintelligible sounds resembling speech, he insisted. However, he acceded that Leo had an unusually high comprehension of hand signals and even seemed to know what they wanted from him even before they spoke.

Helena was frustrated with Gábor's resistance accepting the strange sounds Leo made in an attempt to formulate human speech and often argued with him over it. Unable to break out from his perception that nature had cheated him out of a normal child, he retreated into his private hell. He wanted normal children with this woman he loved with every fibre of his being and felt thwarted in his expectations and suspected his genes were responsible for Leo's deformation.

On occasions, Ivan sensed a tension between husband and wife and put it away as a normal thing that happens between couples and especially when they seemed heavily focused on the construction of the house alongside their professions. Four days of the week, the couple conducted their careers and the other days were filled with work on the house. They saw people only in their professional dealings and became accustomed living their life in the isolated outskirts near Secret Cove. For over two years they had laboured without any leisure activity until the home was finished and their relationship took a downward trend. The intimacy, which had been vibrant and full of passion for each other, sunk to the deepest level, but the love they had was as strong as it was from the beginning. However, fear to produce children as deformed as Leo, kept them from performing intercourse the way they both enjoyed and led to abstinence, something neither of them had envisioned. Sexually active and virile, deeply in love, now he forced himself to keep a physical distance from Helena as much as possible, creating a hell for them both, and thus the years passed.