Why look back?

Fragile

What am I doing here, in a faraway land, hurtling down a bumpy potholed highway on a quest to locate some long-forgotten family heirlooms and general life satisfaction? Sheer madness, said Tom. The language of this country I can understand but I can’t speak it very well. I need to compose my sentences carefully before I start. The people’s body language and gestures seem almost alien to me. But I am satisfied, for this is the journey of all journeys I am compelled to do. I’ve had it well-thought out for ages. This is my holy grail, so to speak, as Mary would say.

Strange all this, admittedly, for a person who went to a poetically named school (Harfang de Neige in Pierrefonds) in a distinctly rundown neighborhood. Together with other even seemingly more vulnerable children, I had been victim of this Somali-American bully called Robert. For three full years, repeatedly, he and his gang of tiny pupil-soldiers would chase me round the block, surround and grab me, bring me down to the ground, then sit on top of me and press my face into the hard-packed snow. The teachers didn’t see all this – or didn’t want to see it. ‘We know about him and we are dealing with it’, the headmaster had once reassured my mother. The kid was only stopped after Martha, a tall black girl, formed her own gang, a gang of angels, and had once thrashed this bully and his entire posse. Only one single time, but it was enough. After that, we all started blossoming. The teachers did not see that either.

How logical is this journey? Entirely logical, for in my rundown and plain neighborhood my savior was not just Martha but the local library. Located in Dollard-des-Ormeaux, the neighboring municipality, only two bus stops away, it would become my refuge through many years to come. It was here that I first came across that strange name – Jaroslavice—evidently the place where my mother was born (according to her birth certificate). Dozens years later, I am going to see Jaroslavice – or rather what’s left of it because big chunks of the village had apparently been flooded to give way to a dam. I am returning somewhere I had never been to, except in my imagination. I am hoping for some revelations.

During the war

Clarissa

At the beginning there was the place. A small village, a hamlet almost, where everybody knew everybody and talked not just about those alive but even those who had long passed, for there were few pastimes cherished more than simple gossip.

When Emma gave birth to a baby girl there, right in the middle of that most vicious 20^th century war, people were suitably surprised. How will the parents feed this little creature amidst all the hardships and deprivations? What if the father were to take ill and could not work anymore? Or worse still, what if he were to be arrested, finally, for stealing wood in the forest? Tom told me later that other people had apparently stopped having babies.

Emma presented her little girl at the nearby small-town registry six months later, entering her name as Clara Elisabeth, explaining that she could not come earlier as it had been snowing heavily and she was afraid the baby could catch cold or worse – they could simply get lost in the forest on the way to town. The girl would later be called simply Clarissa (and later still just Clari). She looked way too large for a six-month-old baby, and rumors had started there and then that Emma may have stolen the child somewhere, or that some refugees had left her behind, or even that she could have been, god forbid, her husband’s child from a different relationship. All this because Emma had longed for a child for so long, almost an eternity, that the actual birth seemed unreal. Moreover, nobody remembered seeing Emma pregnant.