THE BASTARD

“They have told me that this was what I had been wearing back in Smyrna, Sofia. The man who saved me handed it over to the Orphanage when he left me there; it was the only testimony of my origins. The Administration gave it to me upon my leaving the Institution to find my own way in life. This is the only token of my family. Just a name, which may be mine or my savior’s family or even some other unknown child’s that had fled the
Destruction. I have never been officially registered anywhere by that name; I am, like you, “of unknown origins”.