When I was three a young man turned up to live in the basement flat with the woman who’d escaped the Czech revolution. She, a refugee, had been given a job and a home by my mother, he was her husband, not Czech, probably Australian or from New Zealand. It’s likely she married him for Commonwealth residency, I’ve spoken to other Czech refugees from the time who knew her and that was their best guess. Our home, the tall cold house in London, was a place of many rooms and many lives; bohemian, socialist, crowded, wealthy, artistic, noisy and lonely and trying to track the details of one particular person has been like chasing a ghost. My mother recalls him as handsome and freckled, blonde hair, someone else has compared him to Donny Osmond, another is adamant she doesn’t remember him, one person called him a memory implant, someone else said shadowy, no one can bring up a single conversation or ever seeing him upstairs in the kitchen where everyone gathered, or what he did with his day, where he worked, no details of him at all, not even a discussion arranging his arrival and this haze speaks volumes of a person who was there for just over two years and, like Keyser Söze, was gone. If it weren’t for the fact that he had remained for me a memory unbroken his name, the truth of him, would have sunk entirely. But I never forgot him. In my mind, unquestioned, he’d had the title first love, a mystery figure who’d paid me attention in a house where it was scarce. I had nothing to base this conviction on, it just sat there like a sticker on a box I carried around as I travelled through my life searching for what was wrong, no memories for illustration except this one, the day of his leaving. We were in the hall by the big black front door, I was nearly six. He crouched down before me and told me he had to go but he would take me with him. All I had to do was go and pack a bag and wait for him in the garden. I did this, ran upstairs, fetched my rainbow rucksack, goodness knows what I put in it but I put it on my back and went outside and sat on the wooden bridge that linked the playroom glass doors to the patch of grass and I waited. And I waited and when I couldn’t wait any longer I walked to the end of the street in case I’d missed him, and then I walked home, in through the big black front door, probably to supper at the table and this person who I’d been willing to leave with was gone and his existence never mentioned and it was as if he had never existed at all. Except that he left the woman who was his wife and was our nanny too and she didn’t forget either.
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Another intriguing post!
This answers so much in the writer and in the reader .