When I look back to my childhood, it is in indistinct shades of grey, punctuated by regular splashes of colour. The colour is foreign in every sense, it bubbles with life and laughter, and its colours are pine green, lapis lazuli and Umbrian red. It rises around me in mountainsides and lakes, gilded churches and marbled mosques, lace-making and lederhosen. It is rich with the viscous heat of the nightly promenade and the smell of pizza and chicken in a basket. It is the sound of the oompah band and Puppet on a String, it is Europe in the 1960s.
Even now, somewhere in Southern Germany, there is a lake of brilliant crystal blue, as clear as the laughter in a baby’s eyes, and cold as ice. But the young man who ploughed ripples in the water on that day, now sports a belly and ripples his keyboard. The steps still wind down towards the harbour in Napoli, crowded by the houses which lean in above them. But the old lady, shrouded in black, now lies buried in some equally crowded ground. The market in Old Istanbul probably still bustles its wares down by the water, the peaches still three good, one rotten in the bag. But the wily stallholder now sits on the steps of his daughter’s house and worries his beads with sun wrinkled hands. The boulevard in Isfahan that welcomed you from with desert, no doubt still does, but probably not with shocking green abundance; war and fundamentalism have clothed Iran in plainer garb.
And so it is with memory, it is real, but not populated with reality. I could go back and see the lake, if I could find it. I could walk again around the streets of Florence. But I could not stand, innocent, drowning in David’s beauty as I did then. I want to know that once I did this, ate that, or marvelled at some architectural grandeur. I want to feel that I had a life rich in experience, to hold it in to myself, to possess it, to indulge in it. But I can only know it as I know, that I have walked the halls of Pemberly with Elizabeth Bennet, and fought the good fight with Harry Potter.
Salatheel 