News from Home
The second exile, which takes the country from the memory
A letter came last week from the town where I was born, the first in more than thirty years.
It was written by the son of a friend, a man I remember only as a child in short trousers.
He wrote to tell me, gently, that my friend had died, and that the old had been demolished.
The street where we played as boys is now a car park beneath a tower of glass and steel.
I read the letter twice, and then I sat for a long while, holding it as if it might grow warm.
For thirty years I had carried that town inside me, unchanging, like a city sealed in glass.
In my mind the linden still stood, the baker still shouted, the church bell still rang at six.
Now I understood that the real town had gone on without me, ageing and dying while I looked away.
The place I had been for no longer existed, and in truth had not existed for years.
I had been to a country that had quietly become a photograph of itself.
This, I have found, is the second exile, and it is in some ways crueller than the first.
The first took the country from the man; the second takes the country from the memory.
After the first, one can still say to oneself that the place goes on without one.
After the second, one learns that it does not go on at all, and never waited.
The town I mourned had been mourning nothing, for it had forgotten me long before I feared it might.
There is a strange freedom, I confess, hidden inside this second and heavier .
If the place I longed for is gone, then I am released from the duty of longing for it.
I need no longer measure this life against a home that was, after all, already a .
The young man's letter ended by inviting me, kindly, to visit what the town has now become.
I will not go, but for a new reason, no longer fear but a kind of completed .
One does not visit a grave to find the person; one visits only to admit that they are gone.
And I have admitted it here, at my own desk, without the long journey and the final disappointment.
I wrote back to the young man, thanking him, and asked him one question only.
I asked whether, by any chance, the old linden tree had been spared when they cleared the street.
He answered that it had, that they had built the car park carefully around it.
So one thing stands, at least, of all I remember, rooted where it has always been.
It is not much to be left with, one tree in a car park in a town I will never see.
But it is enough to prove that the past was real, and that is more than usually grants.