spared the perpetual onslaught of snow. Hendrik’s leaving seemed to foretell the coming of the snow, both in my heart and in our town. Yet just as the initial lazy flakes of white trickled down to earth, Hendrik’s first letter arrived.
I still have his letters, each and every one, the only memento I have of him or my dead town. I keep them in the drawer of my nightstand, in a small cedar box I bought many years ago in Rome. It is perhaps ironic that the letters are in English, that my life’s story dances across those pages in a language that was never quite my own. When I settled here, in my new island home, I was not aware that most of the people here were British or that even the natives spoke English, all with that clipped British accent, until I arrived. Sometimes I will sit in a café drinking a cup of strong tea and overhear an expression or a brief snatch of a conversation, just simple words that, when strung together, might make a phrase that can be found in one of Hendrik’s letters, and I am taken right back to them and to him, and for a moment, just a moment, everything is good and happy and whole again. But then the conversation shifts, as swiftly and subtly as the wind, and the mood is broken, and I am myself again, alone and desolate, exiled on this tropical isle so far from anything I used to call home.
In his letters Hendrik wrote of many things: his love for me, of course, but also tales of his life back in the city and news he had collected of larger, though to me, less significant, events. That autumn, the world was brought to war with the assassination of some man in a town and a place I had never heard of. Soon the empire was alight with the news of fighting and bloodshed. It amazed me then, and still does now, that the death of one man can lead to so much more death. I saw that death, stood knee deep in mud and viscera in the trenches of France on the western front. It was wet and bloody and disgusting. It wasn’t the clean death of a town buried in mere moments by tons of white, purifying snow. This was ugly. When the war was done, when a battle was won or lost, there was no shining vista, no pretty picture card or alpine landscape staring back from where once a proud village had stood. There was only blood.
I still read his letters, sometimes every day, sometimes three or four times a day. They smell of cedar, from the box mostly, but I still imagine his scent lingers there as well. They are yellowed by now, and in some places the ink has faded so much the words can no longer be read. It is no matter; I know what they say, know every dispatch, every word by heart, but still I read them if only to remind me of what we once had and that a man like Hendrik once existed in the annals of my life.
Hendrik talked of war, but he also talked of art and fashion and above all things love. Sometimes he’d talk of the love he’d read of in great books or a story he’d seen depicted on the stage, in a theater, or at a film. And in those lovers, Hendrik wrote, he saw us, or was reminded of a moment we had shared. How I wished I could share those moments with him, to read the books he read or see the shows he saw. But such things did not exist in Pilsden. And a film! Of course no one in the village had ever seen a cinema show. Though I must confess that the very notion of moving images on screen seemed such a novelty and filled me with such curiosity that for a moment, the very idea pushed even Hendrik from the center of my thoughts. But only for a moment and never longer. For always there was Hendrik, center stage in my mind, and Hendrik’s world that he wrote so meticulously about, and that I so desperately longed to share.
Though it soon became apparent I was not the only member of the family to have Hendrik on my mind.
It was a little over a month after Hendrik’s family had left Pilsden. Father was involving me more in the daily operations of the mine. I surmised that perhaps he had previously
I still have his letters, each and every one, the only memento I have of him or my dead town. I keep them in the drawer of my nightstand, in a small cedar box I bought many years ago in Rome. It is perhaps ironic that the letters are in English, that my life’s story dances across those pages in a language that was never quite my own. When I settled here, in my new island home, I was not aware that most of the people here were British or that even the natives spoke English, all with that clipped British accent, until I arrived. Sometimes I will sit in a café drinking a cup of strong tea and overhear an expression or a brief snatch of a conversation, just simple words that, when strung together, might make a phrase that can be found in one of Hendrik’s letters, and I am taken right back to them and to him, and for a moment, just a moment, everything is good and happy and whole again. But then the conversation shifts, as swiftly and subtly as the wind, and the mood is broken, and I am myself again, alone and desolate, exiled on this tropical isle so far from anything I used to call home.
In his letters Hendrik wrote of many things: his love for me, of course, but also tales of his life back in the city and news he had collected of larger, though to me, less significant, events. That autumn, the world was brought to war with the assassination of some man in a town and a place I had never heard of. Soon the empire was alight with the news of fighting and bloodshed. It amazed me then, and still does now, that the death of one man can lead to so much more death. I saw that death, stood knee deep in mud and viscera in the trenches of France on the western front. It was wet and bloody and disgusting. It wasn’t the clean death of a town buried in mere moments by tons of white, purifying snow. This was ugly. When the war was done, when a battle was won or lost, there was no shining vista, no pretty picture card or alpine landscape staring back from where once a proud village had stood. There was only blood.
I still read his letters, sometimes every day, sometimes three or four times a day. They smell of cedar, from the box mostly, but I still imagine his scent lingers there as well. They are yellowed by now, and in some places the ink has faded so much the words can no longer be read. It is no matter; I know what they say, know every dispatch, every word by heart, but still I read them if only to remind me of what we once had and that a man like Hendrik once existed in the annals of my life.
Hendrik talked of war, but he also talked of art and fashion and above all things love. Sometimes he’d talk of the love he’d read of in great books or a story he’d seen depicted on the stage, in a theater, or at a film. And in those lovers, Hendrik wrote, he saw us, or was reminded of a moment we had shared. How I wished I could share those moments with him, to read the books he read or see the shows he saw. But such things did not exist in Pilsden. And a film! Of course no one in the village had ever seen a cinema show. Though I must confess that the very notion of moving images on screen seemed such a novelty and filled me with such curiosity that for a moment, the very idea pushed even Hendrik from the center of my thoughts. But only for a moment and never longer. For always there was Hendrik, center stage in my mind, and Hendrik’s world that he wrote so meticulously about, and that I so desperately longed to share.
Though it soon became apparent I was not the only member of the family to have Hendrik on my mind.
It was a little over a month after Hendrik’s family had left Pilsden. Father was involving me more in the daily operations of the mine. I surmised that perhaps he had previously
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