I
Upon disembarking the plane at the
European city, the young man, whose flight had almost not departed, decided to
bury his past.
In the most out-of-the-way reaches of his
memory, he started to dig, with hands shaking, a deepening pit: a sunless receptacle
for the remembrances of a youth stopped in full flight.
Beneath the pit a magma chamber began to
form, pressure mounting with eruptive force, the floor of the pit fracturing.
Alert to the tremors
if not to their true threat, the young man did not so much as cover over the crater
of his memory. He would visit the pit he had dug whenever the need arose,
finding comfort amid the burning vapours and fumes that, each time he would go,
scalded and scorched his skin a little more.
At times, it was his
hole itself that would come and visit him, its breath expelling from its depths
the spirits of days past.
On receiving a visit
from these revenants, the young man would not chase them but would take care
not to disclose their existence to anyone.
II
To his offspring,
he passed on only “happy memories”, generic images of a fantastical Orient. The
furious dance of wild horses. The scent of olive trees in the spring. The blue sea,
waves breaking on the sand with resounding nostalgia. “The dead ought to be
respected”, he would murmur to himself. “Especially when they have not hurt
you”.
III
The man’s children,
haunted by ghosts whose smell or faces they did not know, were met by an enigma
their instincts prohibited them from solving. “This has nothing to do with you”.
These the words heard from the mouth of that man whose whole heart went into
building around them a fortified enclosure, indestructible ramparts against images
he should not have seen.
So it was that, in
secret, in the pitch of night, the children followed the difficult path leading
to the pit, to its mists.
There they
recognised the spectres, their outlines blurred, and undertook to domesticate them.
Sophie Soukias (1988) lives and works in Brussels. After
getting a Master’s degree in Contemporary History, she turned to journalism and
writing, and simultaneously developed a personal photographic practice that has
allowed her to (re)visit her family history as well as the notions of memory
and transmission.