His Grandchild's Question
Where a wound becomes only a story, exile ends
My youngest grandchild, who is seven and was born in this city, asked me a question I could not answer.
She climbed onto my knee, pointed at the old map on my wall, and asked me simply where home was.
For her the word means this apartment, this street, the school two corners away.
For me it means a place on that map that no longer answers to its old name.
We were using the same small word, and meaning two countries that would never meet.
I tried to explain that I had come from somewhere far away, across a sea, before her mother was born.
She listened politely, the way children listen to weather they have never felt on their skin.
My homeland is, to her, a kind of fairy tale, neither quite true nor entirely invented.
She cannot my , because one cannot long for a place one has never touched.
And this, I have come to see, is exactly as it should be, however much it grieves me.
A child rooted in one soil should not be made to bleed for the loss of another.
The exile's is to hand down his wound as though it were an .
I have seen old men do it, filling small children with a grief that was never theirs to carry.
Those children grow up for a country they have never seen, and at home nowhere.
I do not want that for her; I want her to somewhere without or division.
So I did not give her my grief; instead I gave her a story, and a single word in the old tongue.
I taught her the word for grandfather, and she repeated it, laughing at its unfamiliar shape.
She will forget it by next week, most likely, and that too is permitted, and even right.
What I pass on need not be a country; it can be only a warmth she associates with me.
Perhaps, when she is old, she will remember that her grandfather came from far away and loved her.
That is enough, and it asks nothing of her that she cannot freely give.
The map on my wall will mean nothing to her, and I have stopped expecting it to.
It is my map, drawn by my losses, and it cannot be transferred like a piece of furniture.
Each must draw its own, and hers will have this city at its warm centre.
When she climbed down from my knee, she had already forgotten her question.
But I had not, for it had shown me the exact where my exile ends and her belonging begins.
I am the last of my line to carry that lost country as a wound rather than a story.
And when the wound is finally only a story, the exile will at last, in her, be over.