back, I think he just picked up the wrong slide in his excitement, because he wasn’t watching what he was doing. My guess is he meant to pick the one next to it. The slide he actually showed us had been moved to the back of the bunch on purpose. He had filtered it out so that it wouldn’t end up in the projector, so that we wouldn’t get to see it.
The projector rattled.
My mother glanced at the photo, looked away, then back again suddenly, as if she had to convince herself it was really there.
At the right-hand edge of the image stood my father, beside a good-looking young man with thick black hair, dark brown eyes, and an engaging smile. They were posing beneath a chandelier in a large foyer, a wide carpeted staircase with a gilt banister behind them. Opposite them, at the left edge of the image, was a photographer. He had a camera held up to his eye and the others were looking at him. Curious onlookers had gathered around the photographer—more uniformed men, a young woman, people who looked like waiters. The man beside Father was wearing a uniform and had a gun tucked into his belt. There was a cedar stitched onto the left breast of his shirt. A cedar with a red circle round it. Next I studied Father. He was very young and seemed almost shy. The look in his eyes—today, I’d describe it as dreamy—didn’t quite match the rest of the scene. Father was smiling a dreamy smile and saluting. He was wearing the same uniform as the other man, and he too had a gun tucked into his belt.
There are moments in life when you experience something that makes you wonder. Then more of those moments follow. But it’s only much later, when you barely remember those moments, that they acquire new meaning, because in the meantime you’ve learned more about someone or something, more than you knew before. All the inexplicable gestures, looks, movements, and behaviour suddenly make sense. Like finding a piece of a jigsaw and fitting it into the unfinished puzzle you’ve kept for years in case you’d one day manage to complete it.
There are moments when you think about asking a question but decide not to. Your antennae sense a barrier. Your intuition tells you it’s not the right time for that question. Adults can sense this. Children too. But years later, when you know more than you did then, you regret it. You regret not asking the question. The one question that might have explained everything. Why he was wearing a uniform, for example. Why he had a gun. Who the man was beside him. It would have made things so much easier.
Father stared at the picture as if he didn’t recognise himself. There he was on our living-room wall, large as life, standing beside a man who looked as if his uniform was a second skin, as if he’d been wearing it his whole life. I can only speculate now what thoughts went through Father’s mind in that moment. What feelings the slide must have triggered. What memories. What pain, even. We all stared at the picture. Nobody said a word for what seemed like an eternity. Then my sister began to squirm and cry on my lap. Mother snapped out of her stunned silence and took the wriggling bundle from me. She left the room, rocking the baby in her arms. Hakim signalled to Yasmin that they’d better go. She gave me an uncertain look, slid off the couch, took his hand, and they left. Father turned off the projector and slid out of the room with his head bowed. I stayed behind. A second earlier I’d wanted to ask him the story behind that picture. Now I’d decided not to.
-
6
Could I possibly have guessed how much that moment would change our lives? How the seeds of disintegration became slowly and imperceptibly embedded in our family from then on, like a malignant growth discovered too late. It’s only a photo—that’s what I thought back then. A picture of my father with a gun. How was I to know I’d be haunted by that photo forever?
What happened over the next few days is as I’ve described already. Father’s behaviour changed. I sensed that it had something to do with the photo, and several times it was on the tip of my tongue to ask him about it. But I got the feeling that he didn’t want to talk about it, so I held back. I was only seven. I found the world of grown-ups terribly confusing, and when it came to making decisions, I often felt like I was lost in a huge building with way too many doors and corridors, out of which I was supposed to pick the right one. Gut instinct told me it would be better not to ask Mother or Father about the photo. So I trusted my gut.
Now, some twenty years later, I frequently tell myself I should have listened to my head rather than my gut. People tell me it wasn’t my fault. “You were only a child,” they say awkwardly, because that’s all they can think of. “A child can’t read those kinds of signals.” They say that he abused my trust when he made me promise not to tell anyone about the strange phone calls. And that I wasn’t deceiving Mother when I kept quiet about it all. They say this because they don’t know about all the times she shook me and begged me to tell her the truth. They say, “Even if you had done everything differently, what difference would it have made?” But the truth is, their words mean nothing, because I know better.
Even though Father’s behaviour scared me, I still wanted to be close to him. One day I decided to collect him from work at the youth centre. When I set off, the sky was clouding over and the air was so humid that my skin felt clammy, but there was no sign yet of the storm that broke just minutes later. First, big fat raindrops hit the street and a wind gusted up, whipping the newspaper right out of a man’s hands at the bus stop across the road. Waiters came scurrying out of cafés, holding trays over their heads, and glancing suspiciously at the sky or clearing away outdoor tables and chairs while the awnings flapped like startled pigeons. Then the intervals between the raindrops grew shorter and shorter, and seconds later everything turned grey. The rain came down in sheets of lead—and my clothes were far too thin. A cold wind whistled round my ears, and rainclouds trailed across the sky like giant turtles. There was no point in turning back; I was nearly there. I hurried along the pavement, shoulders hunched, hands stuffed into my pockets, trying to avoid the spumes of dirty water sprayed by passing cars. Near the entrance to the youth centre, a bunch of teenagers were sheltering under an overhanging roof, waiting for the storm to pass before going home. One of them—a guy with a striking horseshoe-shaped scar on his forehead—spotted me and held out a packet of cigarettes the way you’d offer a chimp a banana; the others burst their sides laughing. I entered the building. The empty hallway was quite a contrast to the noisy street. The air was stale, the oxygen all used up during the day. I walked past glass cabinets displaying photos of kids playing football or sawing big planks. Father was in some of the pictures, and I recognised the guys from outside too. My shoes left a wet trail on the lino floor. My father’s office was behind one of the last doors on the corridor. Beside his name plate was a registration sheet for a night hike. I went in without knocking. I knew he had a desk with stacks of files on it and expected to find him half-hidden behind them. But he wasn’t. He was standing in front of the desk. And when he saw me come through the door, he hung up the phone in shock.
“Samir! What are you doing here?” The way he said it sounded slightly cross—it wasn’t Samir, what a nice surprise, or Oh dear, you’re all wet.
“I wanted to pick you up from work.” Suddenly I felt like a complete idiot, like someone who turns up at a friend’s house for a surprise party but got the dates mixed up. I felt way too small for this big room I was in, soaked to the skin, and didn’t know what to say.
He looked at me blankly for a minute, as if I’d addressed him in some rare language like Tofalar and was expecting him to decode it for himself. Then he muttered an “Oh,” followed by, “Right. I’m finished here. Let’s go.”
We left his office together, but he didn’t take my hand until we were outside.
“I’m parked over there,” he said, pointing somewhere beyond the curtain of rain. He pulled me along; it was hard to keep up and I nearly tripped. Just before a mighty clap of thunder, I heard one of the gang from before say to the guy with the scar on his forehead, “Hey, guess what? You just offered Brahim’s son a smoke!”
