EXILE The city of your childhood rises between steppe and sea, wheat and light, white with the dust of cockleshells, stargazers, and bones of pipefish, city of limestone soft enough to cut with a hatchet, where the sea unfurls and acacias brought by Greeks on their ships turn white in summer. So yes, you remember, this is the city you lost, city of smugglers and violinists, chess-players and monkeys, an opera house, a madhouse, a ghost church with wind for its choir where two things were esteemed: literature and ships, poetry and the sea. If it happened once, it happened in Odessa. If you return now, it will not be as a being visible to others, and when you walk past, it will not be as if a man had passed, but rather as if someone had remembered something long forgotten and wondered why. If you return, your father will be alive to prepare for you his mint-cucumber soup or give you the little sweet called bird’s milk, and after hours of looking with him for his sandals lost near the sea, you visit again together the amusement park where your ancestors are buried, and then go home to the apartment house built by German prisoners of war, to whom your father gave bread which you remember surprised you. You take the tram to a stop where it is no longer possible to get off, and he walks with you until he vanishes, still holding in his own your invisible hand. — Carolyn ForchÊ
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