| Author: |
Jane Bryce |
| Dated: |
Friday, October 01 2004 @ 07:00 AM EDT |
| Viewed: |
3636 times |
|
I grew up in Moshi, a town at the foot of Kilimanjaro, in Tanganyika, the country which later became Tanzania, where my family lived until I was seventeen. The republic of Tanzania was formed in 1964 by the union of mainland Tanganyika, and the islands of Zanzibar, consisting of Unguja and Pemba. I was born in a southern coastal town called Lindi, which shares the same Swahili culture as Zanzibar. It's an ancient culture, formed out of contact between the Arabs who ruled here for a few centuries, and the Africans they met here. The name 'Swahili' comes from the Arabic word for coast, 'sahil', and means 'people of the coast'. Kiswahili, the language I grew up speaking, is an Arabic and Bantu creole.
How did we get there? My father, who had been a prisoner of war for four years in the Second World War, decided afterwards that he never wanted to be incarcerated again, and went back to university to study forestry, before signing up for the colonial service. My mother had been in the WRNS – the women’s arm of the British Royal Navy – during the war, and had been posted to Tanga, on the coast near the Kenyan border, so she had already encountered Tanganyika when they came here. When they first came, in 1949, they were sent to the Rondo Plateau, a remote area in the south, where my father’s job was to map a forest. This he was to do by walking, or what was known as foot safari, camping in the bush for up to weeks at a time, with a team of porters to carry the tents and provisions. Before she became pregnant with me, my mother went on foot safari with him. I have the pictures they took – a record of the dying days of colonialism, the white administrator with his canvas bath, dinner served at a folding table by lamplight, my mother washing her hair in a stream…but if you’re thinking Robert Redford and Muriel Streep in Out of Africa, you’d be wrong. This was no privileged fantasy of aristocratic escape from civilization and big game hunting. My parents were, in effect, low-paid civil servants, doing a practical job under difficult circumstances. Like so many of their generation, they entered the colonial service for the same reason they had joined the war effort - a desire to ‘do their bit’. It’s astonishing to realize how young they were – 18 when the war broke out, 24 when it ended, the age when idealistic young people nowadays volunteer for service overseas. It’s taken me years to see them as they saw themselves - not as imperial conquerors, but as lowly servants in a hierarchical administrative system.
Not that they didn’t share the attitudes of their time. When I first became aware of the history of colonialism, and of my place in it, I consciously distanced myself from what I saw as my father’s assumptions of superiority and his unquestioning acceptance of the rightness of the European presence in Africa. It was against his views that I formulated my own, with a self-righteousness and zeal for liberation which, although I couldn’t see it, were also part of the pattern of my generation. Where my parents saw themselves as British (my father, though an Australian, was thoroughly English in his manner and attitudes), I proudly saw myself as Tanzanian. It wasn’t even a choice – I didn’t know anything else, and when I did encounter England, I was as out of place there as any African. Sadly, the Tanzanians didn’t see things the same way, and in 1968, my parents were given ten days to leave the country, after 19 years.
Until very recently, I had never been back. For maybe 15 years after we left, whenever I was asked where I came from, I always said ‘Tanzania’. Then one day I woke up and realized that I had a British passport, I had left at the age of 17, and I couldn’t claim it in that way any longer. But where was I to say I was from? I have never been able to answer this question, and I still don’t know what to say when people ask it. The only thing I know with certainty is, I feel African. What this means is, my whole life, whenever I’ve been asked to look at anything, I’ve looked at it from the point of view of someone born in Africa, with a sense of how the world looks from that particular perspective. I feel most at home on African soil. This visit was the first time I’d had the courage to go – what shall I say? ‘back’? ‘home’? As soon as I say that, I know you can never go back, and I know it isn’t home in any real and practical sense. But when I told people I was born in Lindi and they exclaimed, ‘But then you’re Mtanzania!’ – Tanzanian - I needed, after all these years of absence, to believe it.
I went first to Dar-es-Salaam, a city which, I can report, does not live up to its name – Haven of Peace. It is the commercial capital, and a typical large, noisy, African city. In Dar, I moved the time of my flight to Kilimanjaro International Airport forward to avoid arriving in Moshi after dark. Kili was built in the 70s, midway between the towns of Arusha and Moshi, to serve the increasing tourist traffic on what is called the Northern Circuit – the famous wildlife reserves of Serengeti, Ngorongoro and Lake Manyara - and the hordes of climbers heading for the mountain for which it is named. In my day, we flew into Moshi airport, in a Dakota plane with chickens in baskets occupying some of the seats. Today, the old airport, scene of many tearful farewells as children headed off for school in Kenya or England, is used by a private flying club.
Things were desultory at the airport in Dar. A group of men in reflector jackets leaning on a counter and chatting assured me the flight for Kili would be checking in soon. I stood around with other passengers until after the flight was due to leave, and eventually I was sent off to a lounge, where I sat under a loudspeaker playing loud music. As a result, I didn’t hear the calls over the airport speakers inviting Passenger Bryce to hurry to the gate as the flight was departing. When I eventually went to make enquiries, I was in the wrong lounge and the flight had gone. The airport staff was concerned and helpful, and put me on the next flight, which was the one I had changed from originally, and was scheduled to depart six hours later.
To cut a long and tedious story short, I spent eight hours in Dar airport, landing at Kili after 9.30 pm. Clemence, the taxi driver that a friend had called to come from Moshi to meet me, had spent the day at the airport waiting for me. I was so grateful I almost cried. He took me to Keys Hotel, an old established hotel in Moshi used by mountain climbing parties. Moshi is in the foothills and at this time of year, it’s cold at night, so I undid the bolt on the window in my room to try and close it. It fell with a mighty crash and glass shattered all over the bed. I went downstairs for a drink. A more inauspicious start to my homecoming I couldn’t have imagined. I had a strong feeling that things could only get better.
Next day, I came to to the sound of people in the car park below getting into vehicles to set off for the mountain, and a great wave of realisation broke over me. I was in Moshi again, a place I had visited only in my dreams for the last 36 years. When my parents were deported by the Tanzanian government, I was back in my English boarding school, so I left without even saying good-bye. Since then, two types of dreams have carried me back to Moshi. One is the Flying Dream, in which I stretch my arms forwards and fly up and down the contours of the garden and around the roads bordering our house. The other is the Walking Dream, in which I follow the hard-packed red earth bush paths I used to walk as a child, when I was infected by a restlessness that drove me out every evening to range as far as my feet could carry me. In both these dreams, the great snow-capped peak of the mountain floats above the crumpled white cloud-sheets which have shrouded it all day, and now lie discarded at its feet.
This morning, the mountain is obscured as I set out towards the town centre. I have no concrete plan. I am simply going to walk until I see something I recognise, and keep walking, and at some point I know my feet will carry me to the house. This is a Walking Dream, except that I am really here, and the solidity of the red soil beneath my feet reinforces its own reality. A young man greets me in English, and I return the greeting in Kiswahili, thinking, ‘You weren’t even born when I left this place.’ This thought gives me confidence, and I stride ahead as if I know where I’m going, which I do. There’s the roundabout and the road to town, there’s the mosque with its multiple green-tipped minarets, there’s the Hindu temple, smelling of incense, and I’m walking down a street of shops, and in front of one of them, I come to a halt. The building is semi-derelict, its windows blank, its structure crumbling, but on the front, quite clearly, is the name: ‘Mulji’s Emporium.’ Mulji, the Indian shopkeeper from whom my parents bought single jars of the expensive delicacies he imported to please European tastes. Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade. Branston Pickle – in our house, there was a saying, ‘Branston Pickle is not for children’, which meant we coveted it more than anything. Lea and Perrins. Angostura Bitters. Heinz Tomato Ketchup.
I come back to myself when I realise that a white woman of a certain age standing still in the street with tears streaming down her face is an object of curiosity to the people passing. Glancing through the door of the nearest shop, I see a couple of Indian men chatting behind the counter and I duck inside and ask about them, about Mulji. What happened to him? Oh, the old man died (later I remembered there was a story that he was murdered), and after the nationalisation of property in 1971, the children left and went to Europe and America. What about you? I ask. Oh, we stayed, and now business is good. I look around at the shelves laden with electronic goods, all imported. For ten years, during the height of the socialist experiment in Tanzania, you could be arrested for having a bar of soap imported from outside. Now, however, people are reclaiming their properties and businesses, even, in the case of a Greek farmer I heard of, their farms. But it’s too late for some families, all the children have gone elsewhere, married and settled, and are lost to Tanzania.
I continue walking, through a quarter of African shops, with mattresses piled high on the pavement, and handpainted signs, and the infectious sound of Congolese music blaring from radios. It reminds me of West Africa, and I realise I probably never saw it in my earlier life, circumscribed by a European lifestyle with its rigid proprieties. A young girl follows me and we talk until my limited store of Kiswahili runs out, and I continue alone up Boma Road. This is where the District Commissioner’s office was, an air of importance radiating from its whitewashed boundary markers and proudly upright flagpole. Apart from the fact that it now flies the Tanzanian flag, I can’t see any evidence of change. It is as spick and span as if just readied for inspection, and although it's Sunday, a solitary gardener weeds industriously in the inner courtyard. The Boma is on one of Moshi’s wide tarred roads, well maintained but with more foot than wheeled traffic. I walk on, and in front of me I see another well-remembered monument of the past: the Greek Orthodox Church. As a teenager, given to seeing the world in terms of poetry, I used to see its round white dome as a replica of the snowy peak of the mountain which hung above it. I walk around it in delight, and through the open door someone sees me from inside and comes out to say hello. It is the pastor, but not a Greek, a Tanzanian, and he tells me the church was sold by the Greek community to the Southern Baptists when all the Greeks left, but that they are now negotiating to get it back. ‘We are sympathetic’, he says, ‘we know what it means to them.’ Like all the Tanzanians I have met on this trip, he has a gentleness and dignity which instantly makes me want to be like them.
I can’t stop, in the dream I have to keep walking, and I go on. There’s a sign pointing to the Commonwealth war cemetery, and again, though this is not part of my memories, I’m curious and I follow it. I come to a low wall containing five straight rows of white headstones, engraved with the names of 95 men who died fighting for the British in the First World War. They are both Christian and Moslem, from the King’s African Rifles, the Army Service Corps, the East African Military Labour Service. The graveyard is beautifully kept, the headstones spotless, the grass clipped. The sun is getting hotter now, and an atmosphere of peace pervades the place, with only another solitary gardener watering nearby. Sitting there, on a bench facing the headstones, I realise how many preconceptions I’ve brought with me on this journey. I know Tanzania is a poor country, or was until recently, and therefore I expected a degree of ramshackleness, of corner-cutting and prioritisation of what should be looked after. The careful tending of these graves, years after anyone probably remembers their occupants, moves me and makes me reconsider my prejudices. I wonder why my father never brought us here, considering his patriotism as a fighter pilot with the Royal Airforce in World War Two. Next door, there’s another cemetery for soldiers from that very War, and nearby, what I take to be the general graveyard, with many people who would have been my contemporaries buried there. Some of the graves are fresh, decorated with tinfoil and wilted flowers. I walk on, in search of more immediate human contact, and stop for roasted corn and a peeled orange at the side of the road. The stallholder has several chickens in a cage, and I watch a customer bargain for one of them, holding it in his hand to test its weight. I remember my mother doing the same at the market in the old days, and how we’d take the chicken home and feed it up for a week, before slaughtering it for Sunday dinner. I remember watching the gardener chase and catch the poor bird, and cut through its neck with a panga, a large blade. I once took a stick and stirred the pool of blood it left on the ground, and was surprised how sticky it was. I couldn’t eat the chicken, and still can’t to this day. When I notice the stallholder is holding the chicken down in the act of sawing through its neck, I get up and say goodbye.
I’ve walked a long way now, but something is growing in me. I’m certain I’m getting close, that this is the edge of the neighbourhood where I grew up with my sisters, and if I just keep going, I’ll inevitably get there. I strike off onto a bush path – like any African, I’ll always look for a short cut when the main road is getting long-winded. I’m weaving through the backs of colonial era houses, solid and well built, surrounded by gardens. These are the kind of houses my friends lived in, the houses I visited with my mother, the gardens I played in. I am in suspense, waiting for that particular corner, that special landmark, which will tell me I’ve come home. Then I’m walking down a wide, well paved road with old trees on either side. I know this road. It’s called Kilimanjaro Road, and runs west to east, with the mountain on the left hand side still hidden by cloud, and the Police Training School grounds where we used to see groups of Chinese sitting in a circle when the communists were courting President Nyerere. My road, the road with my house, branches off this one. I know exactly where I am. In another few minutes, I will be there.
As I hesitate for a moment, a couple who have been following me catch up and say hello. They are Simon and Grace, and they’ve been to church nearby and are walking home. They want to know what I’m looking for and if they can help, so I tell them I’m looking for the Anglican church. Oh, says Simon, you mean St Margaret’s Church. Yes, come on, we’ll show you.
So it happens that I’m escorted to the street where I grew up by two protectors. They don’t know it but they are gatekeepers to the past, and are about to unlock the gate for me to walk through. When I tell them – as I keep telling anyone who cares to listen – that I was born in Tanzania and have come back to visit, they instantly tell me I’m welcome, I’m at home and should relax. Then they leave me, and I turn to face the church.
It is at one of the end of the road, and our house is at the other. I passed this church every day of my life. I worshipped here with my mother, I was confirmed here by the archbishop of East Africa, my little sister was christened here, and when my father left government service and was no longer entitled to a house, we spent a few months in the nearby church bungalow where Sunday School was held. I remember every tree, the atmosphere of the churchyard, and though the church is locked, I can picture the inside. I regret not having remembered it’s Sunday, because I could have attended service this morning. Even though I no longer call myself a Christian, I feel the need of a ritual, some kind of formal blessing.
Instead, I start to walk up the avenue of jacarandas, the purple flowering trees which in the rainy season dropped their petals on the road so that you walked on a purple carpet. These trees, presumably (I think now) planted by the Germans when they ruled Tanganyika before the First World War, are old and their branches meet in a canopy overhead, so that sunlight is filtered in shifting patterns on the tarmac. They are the same trees. Part of my dream, but real, and they’ve been waiting here – it seems to me – quietly growing, since I left. The house is on the corner, and now I have my first shock. Around the garden, there used to be a hedge with yellow bell-shaped flowers which we would wear on our fingertips like witches’ talons. And a furrow all along the hedge on the outside, which ran with water in the rains, and which we would have to jump across. And a guava tree with silver bark, guarding the gap in the hedge.
The house is surrounded by an ugly concrete wall, so high that all I can see is the roof (but the same grey tiles). All along the wall is jagged glass, and round the front, a thick metal gate. I try climbing up on the bank to peer over, but I can’t see anything. I am nonplussed. The wall tells me that the house is now on the defensive, no longer open to the road, but separate and standoffish. I take a deep breath. I haven’t come this far to be kept out by a wall, and I ring the bell on the gate. And wait.
A young woman comes to the gate, opens it, and beckons me inside. She must be a housegirl, because she leads me to the verandah and asks me to wait. It is the very same verandah, the one where the guinea pig cage used to be, where my parents sat in the evenings and drank gin or beer with friends, where I whiled away time with visitors as I got older. Only a second, and the door opens, and I’m invited inside.
It may sound ridiculous, but I have to summon all the will power I possess to cross that threshold. If memory is one of the defining attributes of human beings, what happens when you lose it? The sense of risk is overwhelming, and I literally hold the past in my hands as I enter the room.
A man is sitting in front of a large television, eating. He looks at me calmly, as if a white stranger stepping through the door on a Sunday afternoon were the most ordinary thing in the world, and tells me ‘karibu’, welcome. He asks me to sit down. We exchange pleasant greetings for a few minutes, but he doesn’t ask me what I want. So I tell him, I used to live in this house. Oh, he responds enthusiastically, then you must have lunch with me. You see, you’ve met me eating, please join me.
And so I find myself, eating ugali (maize meal porridge) and stew in my parents’ old living room, with the new owner of my childhood house. His name is Victor, and he bought the house a year or two previously. He likes the house. It has a lot of space, he says. He looks at home, sitting there, comfortable, content. We talk about the old days, and it turns out his father, like mine, was a forester, but in Arusha, not Moshi. Victor himself is the chief engineer of roads for the Kilimanjaro Region. Three little girls come into the room, two daughters and a friend. They show me their school books, and it turns out the youngest goes to the same kindergarten, two streets away, that I attended before Primary School. I ask to see their room, and they lead me through the house – the bang bang door which used to separate the bedrooms from the rest of the house has gone, but everything else is the same. They take me into my parents’ old bedroom, where there are now four little beds. They lead me through the house, the kitchen – the fridge has moved, but it’s our old kitchen – and the garden - sadly bare and brown and missing some of the big old trees. The carefully watered grass and the lovingly nurtured rose beds, the terraces and shrubs are gone, but there’s a shamba at the back growing maize and bananas. Victor tells me he found the garden like this, but he wants to remake it. He has plans, he sees how the garden might enclose the house in green again.
It’s late in the afternoon by the time I can bear to drag myself away. All this time, no-one makes me feel I’m intruding, or that they have better things to do. Victor seems happy for me to stay all day, and starts pouring me wine. But I still have walking to do, and I say good-bye. As I walk away, a great burden lifts, and I realise what’s happened to me is a healing. I dreaded losing what was most precious, and instead, I’ve gained something I could never have imagined. I’ve met the inhabitants of my old home, and they’re a family like we were, they love it as we did, and the little girls will have the same happy memories of growing up there. The past is not only intact, but the present is just as good, just as interesting.
In a daze, I reach the end of the road, and as I emerge from another canopy of trees, I see the mountain. The two peaks, snow-capped Kibo, and rocky Mawenzie, have come out, and sit shining in the evening sunlight. I don’t recognise the feeling I have at this moment. It’s only later I’m able to name it. It’s joy.
I had decided that after Moshi, I would go to Marangu. Marangu is a village on the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro, from where parties of climbers set off to climb the mountain. For me, it was a memory of cool afternoons, picnics by the waterfall, swimming in the river, tea and the pool at Marangu Hotel. It was a favourite expedition of my family’s, a retreat from the heat a few thousand feet lower down. Sometimes, we would go higher, as far as the first mountain climbers’ hut, Mandara, and wander about in the strangely different vegetation that grew at that altitude. But most often, we stopped in Marangu. I wanted to see it again.
I went online to book a room at Marangu Hotel, and noticed the name of the proprietors: Brice-Bennett. It was a name I remembered, a family who had been there when mine was. I couldn’t recall individuals, except for the name Fionnuola. As a teenager, Fionnuola Brice-Bennett was slightly older and impossibly glamorous and couldn’t possibly have noticed me, but I hoped she might notice me now. I wrote to say I was a returning resident, visiting places I used to know, and could they kindly give me a room at a discount as I wasn’t a tourist. Yes, the answer came, back, you can have the residents’ rate.
Feeling encouraged, I caught a dalla dalla, one of the small buses ubiquitous in Africa, from the bus station. I couldn’t see anything most of the way because a large man was sitting on top of me, but I couldn’t complain because everyone else had someone sitting on top of them too. I fell out at the gates of Marangu Hotel and staggered up the drive. The air was cool and clear, and the old farmhouse building, which forms the main reception, was more or less as I remembered it. I was shown to a bungalow in the middle of a lawn, surrounded by trees, and dumped my bag. Then I headed for the tables dotted about on the grass outside the bar area. I had spotted a group sitting at one of them, who I just knew had to be Brice-Bennetts. There were three men and a woman, and they didn’t look like tourists. They weren’t talking about climbing, for a start, and looked relaxed – as if they owned the place, I thought.
I went up and introduced myself. Instantly, I was made to sit down and have a drink. It was about five o’clock in the afternoon, and there were several large bottles of Kilimanjaro beer on the table. Anyone who wasn’t drinking beer was drinking double whiskies. I asked for a gin and tonic, and when the waitress asked ‘double or single’, Desmond told her, ‘Double of course, she was born here.’
At the table were the three grown-up children of Margaret Brice-Bennett, who ran the hotel when my family used to go there in the 50s and 60s, and who my parents knew. The Brice-Bennett story is romantic. The father, who was considerably older, had fallen in love with Tanganyika but had gone to live in Nigeria when he married Margaret. He kept it in mind as a dream to return to, and when Desmond and Fionnuola, the two older children, who were born in Nigeria, were still very young, he put them all in a car and drove there from Nigeria, a journey of several weeks across Africa. They settled in Marangu, and Seamus, the youngest, was born in Moshi. Margaret was Irish, and brought her children up on Republican songs and Irish myths. She used to say there were only two places on earth she felt at home, the west of Cork and Marangu, because they were exactly the same. When she died a year or so ago, she had become an elder of the community and the funeral cavalcade from Marangu to Moshi stretched for several miles.
The land on which Marangu Hotel was built was bought from Chief Marealle of Marangu in 1907 by a Czech missionary, who started a coffee farm on it. In 1932, he built a guest house, and by the 1950s, when the Brice-Bennetts arrived, he had abandoned farming completely. Margaret joined Erika, the missionary’s wife, in running the hotel in 1961, and they ran it together until Erika’s death. When Margaret started to find it too much of a burden, Desmond, Fionnoula and Seamus found their way back from their different corners of the world. Desmond had been a criminal lawyer in Alaska, and lived amongst the Inuit for thirty years. Fionnoula, mother of five sons, had lived in Swaziland and Zimbabwe. Seamus had become a policeman in England.
That first afternoon was another homecoming for me. None of us having quite synchronized in age, we hadn’t known each other as children, but we knew plenty of people in common, and more than that, they understood why I was there. ‘It’s your home,’ said Fionnoula, ‘you must make this your base. Don’t go back to Moshi, stay here. You’re our guest, we don’t even want you to pay.’ Many double whiskies had flowed by this time, and I disregarded the letter and embraced the spirit of Irish-African hospitality. (But when I left, they wouldn’t let me pay.) With the three Brice-Bennetts was Pete, an ornithologist who had damaged his feet by falling off the bar, where he was dancing one night. He told me about living in a cave in Kenya while re-introducing the bearded vulture to the wild, guarding the nest from predators and climbing over the edge of a cliff to inspect it. Desmond described going on a trek in the wilds of Alaska, steering by the sun, building an igloo, fishing through the ice. Seamus told me how he had thought, when he was on the beat in Notting Hill in London, that coming from Africa, he would be able to talk to West Indians, and was shocked to discover they saw him as a white man. When it got dark, we went inside and made a fire, and sat around it talking and drinking. Much later, it was only me and Desmond left, having a last whisky and reminiscing. Then I staggered off to bed.
The next morning, I set off with Saroki, a young Chagga man from the area, to revisit the waterfall. We walked all day through the shambas, winding our way through the banana and coffee groves, dotted with little immaculate homesteads glimpsed from the pathway, with their swept red earth yards and carefully tended flowers. After a while, the sound of the river began to infiltrate the trees, and as we clambered down the hillside, it grew louder and louder. At last, we came to the bottom, where it rushed over flat, wide stones, half-submerged like the glossy backs of hippos. And then, the waterfall. This one is called Ndoro, meaning Colobus monkey in Kichagga. Colobus monkeys have very dramatic colouring, black with a flash of white, and are long-haired with very long black and white tails. They are so striking that people – in this case white people - used to use their skins as floor mats when I was a child.
Ndoro is a sheet of white water pouring itself over a black rock. The people who named it had a precise sense of poetry, as it looks like nothing more than a Colobus tail flashing through the trees. It is a perfectly peaceful place, lush and green and pure, a forgotten corner of Eden. If you sit on a rock in the river and gaze at the waterfall, caressed by its shattered droplets, its crashing and splintering gradually overwhelm you, and time is suspended. I don’t know how long I sat, but I came to suddenly, realizing that Saroki had been patiently waiting. We went on, following the course of the river upstream, exactly as I used to do on family outings, hopping from stone to stone, getting splashed and falling in sometimes. The water comes straight from the mountain, a melted glacier. It’s like water from the source of life itself, so pure and cold it stings you.
We came to a second waterfall, an open space. A gorge like a cathedral of sculpted rock, white trumpet lilies as in old paintings of the Anunciation. Bright butterflies hover over a carpet of purple flowers. In the distance, the scarlet bells of an African flame tree. Our picnic spot of forty years ago, the same rocks, some like hippos, some like elephants, and the same trees. I stood on a stone in the river, and saw the sun-browned bodies of three little girls, shrieking in delight as they were swept downstream by the current, bumping against the rocks. I saw a woman sitting on a blanket on the grass, setting out food, and a man with a movie camera, filming the children. They say you can’t step into the same river twice, but there they were, my family, and I was in that river. The rock beneath me, the air, the cold spray, the sound of falling water; the longer I stood, the more things came together, I felt the distance close and the past draw near to me, the spirits of who we were assemble in silence. All these years I had remembered this as the most beautiful place on earth. I had to come back to convince myself that what I had in my heart wasn’t a trick of memory, it was the truth.
|
|
 |
|
---
Doris Ray