* * *
Gulnaz’s excitement seems uncontainable. Even in the midst of ferrying, feeding or clearing she’s attracting his attention from across the dining room, and when at last she has a moment, she hurries over and flops herself down at his table.
“We’re so thrilled by the progress you’ve made in the last few days. I rang Jon Prentice last night and told him about you speaking again. He wants to come over and see you. He thinks that being here has unlocked something. He’s suggesting we continue your speech therapy from next week.”
Alex can see her choosing her next words with some care.
“We were wondering about counselling too. The things you were saying to Margaret about your father sounded very distressing. Was that something you’ve remembered? I was wondering how well you remember your father – and whether any other memories are starting to come back.”
And so begins the grilling he’d feared would come with the return of his voice.
“No. No memories. It was all from that letter I got.”
“Ah, yes. I was wondering about the letter. Jon said that Mr Greenall had also visited you in hospital. Who is he?”
“My uncle. He and Dad were in the Navy together.”
“Your uncle Martin? Daniel has told me a little about him. He owns the garden centre where Daniel works, doesn’t he?”
“That’s what he told me. Here. I think you should read it.”
He pulls the envelope from his jacket and hands it over. She unfolds the pages and falls silent. He finds himself re-reading each paragraph in the shifting muscles of her face.
“Oh my god. My god! Daniel explained that your father had died in the Falklands but he never mentioned any of this.” Her anguish seems to go deeper than mere pity. Like it touches a raw nerve. “Do you think he even knew? Oh, those poor people.”
A hand moves up to her brow to take the weight of the words and tugs at a clutch of hair. Her other hand feels its way across the table and draws the water jug over. Then, as she sips, she slides the letter aside and stares straight ahead. Twice her lips part, only to close again. Then at last she says, “Try not to think too badly of your father. War can do terrible things to people. It doesn’t mean he wasn’t a good man.”
They’re just the words needed to crack open the shell. The tirade that follows is as much of a surprise to Alex as it is to Gulnaz. Language spews from his mouth, pre-empting the memories, maybe even defining them, but he’s never spoken with more certainty of the truth.
“Good?? He was a bastard! And I’m glad to know how he died. I prefer him this way, as a coward rather than a hero. The bugger used to hit me every time I brought shells home from the beach – smack me over the backs of my hands or the side of my head. Sometimes he made me run up and down, up and down the road because I was slower than my brother. Until I almost collapsed from exhaustion. And he called me horrible names because I didn’t like football.”
For the first time he’s really there. Not that smartened up cul-de-sac from a few weeks back with its topiaries and climbing plants and double glazing, but the scrubby little council estate full of clapped out cars and broken bottles, back and forth till his legs and lungs make him cry, till his head thumps and his eyes are blinded by stars.
“And he bullied my mother. He was a total prick…”
“Alex, please.” She rests a hand on his arm to stop him. “Your memory is coming back. Don’t rush into this. Have some water. We need to do this properly, with someone who can make it easier for you.”
“To think I used to admire that man. I respected him, I was proud of him. God, I wanted to be like him. Now he just disgusts me. I’m ashamed to be his son.”
She hands back the letter and strokes his shoulder.
“It’s okay. Look, I’ll soon be off duty. Let’s get some fresh air. Do you think you could manage a short walk in the park?”
A walk in the park.
History repeating itself.
The grey afternoon sky and winter chill have left Prince Albert Gardens all but deserted, just the odd dog walker brave enough to face the elements. With luck, Alex’s baggy coat and scarf will keep him warm long enough for the effort of walking to take over. Gulnaz is careful to keep to his speed. The path ahead sneaks around bushes, opening again, occasionally dividing. Down on the lawns by the lake, two children are laughing and throwing sticks to their dog, their doting parents watching from the bandstand.
“As children, I think we see our parents as infallible,” Gulnaz says. He might have thought she was referring to the idyllic scene below had they not talked earlier. “We assume they know everything. If they show any signs of weakness we become confused, angry. But it’s not their perfection that allows us to love them, it’s their… no, weakness isn’t really the right word… it’s their vulnerability. I think we don’t always realise that until we grow up.”
Alex’s eyes are torn from the bandstand to the tip of his walking stick making little graves in the earth.
“We can only love them if they love us first.”
“Yes, you’re right, but I bet your father did love you – and Daniel too. But to love is itself to become vulnerable. If someone doesn’t dare show their vulnerability then they can’t properly show their love. It doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”
Greenall had said his dad felt guilty over the way he’d treated them all. And there was the olive branch of the magic set. But it wasn’t enough. Forgetting himself, he takes her hand, the first time he’s initiated contact.
“I bet your parents loved you when you were a kid. You started to tell me about them a while ago, but I went and changed the subject.”
An answer is forming on her lips before a laugh carries it away.
“No, I told Daniel about my parents. Sounds like he’s been confiding in you over our little moments of intimacy!”
He frowns, convinced at first of the memory, but finding it, like so many others, steadily slipping into thin air. Fortunately, she doesn’t pursue the matter.
“We were rather a beleaguered family, which made us very close.”
He tries to focus again on her words.
“Beleaguered? What do you mean?”
“We always had to watch our backs. My father’s relatives were unhappy about him converting to Christianity and marrying an Armenian. When the revolution happened it became very difficult being a Christian. It had become such an extremist Muslim regime by then. It made my parents very nervous, so my upbringing was very strict and disciplined, but they always showed me a wealth of love.”
They’ve instinctively been making for the park bench. “Tell me how they died,” he says on impulse, as they lean against its back.
She frees her hand. Perhaps he was being a little too eager. “Oh, this is probably not the best moment… It was a long time ago…”
“Please, it’s important to me.” He can’t stop himself now.
There’s a slight rise in her hairline as the memories pull at her scalp.
“Well, there was the revolution and then the war. A lot of people lost their lives. But I was lucky and I’m here, and I’m safe. Away from it all.”
So that was why the letter had struck her so hard. That brutal account of conflict, the deaths. But he can’t understand this reluctance to spill the beans. Last time she’d have told him – if he’d only been sensitive enough to let her. He closes the gap again between them.
“You’ve no family left?”
“For a while I had my grandfather. We escaped together…” The word itself has escaped her lips before she can recapture it. “…Came to Britain, I mean. He’s been dead only two years.”
Perhaps Alex is stifling her. She places a hand on his forearm and says, “Shall we start heading back? I’m on again soon. We’re rather short staffed this afternoon.”
“For God’s sake. I don’t want to be the only one being ‘cared for’ all the time. I’m tired of everyone’s attention being on me. I want to share in you
r feelings for once.” He covers her hand with his. “I want to understand. Please, let me try.”
She gives in then. Caves in would be more accurate. Her body only just makes it round the bench before crumpling into a heap. Two very overworked and underloved hands smother her lovely, sad face and move with it from side to side.
“Sorry. People do ask me sometimes, out of politeness. I know they mean well. I tell them – I used to tell them. I’d be pouring my heart out and they would just go silent. Or change the subject. So now it’s me that does that.”
It could so easily be his own childhood she’s describing.
“I don’t blame them,” she says. “You can’t understand stuff like that if you’ve never experienced it. People here don’t know the first thing about religious wars, or torture, or having their whole country pillaged by sick, power-crazy monsters. People who can turn men against their own families. Can you imagine that?”
He shakes his head.
Gulnaz laughs. “It’s just stuff you see on the news, isn’t it? It’s somewhere else. Something that only happens in far away foreign places where camels live and women carry great pots on their heads. I can’t compete with that. I can’t make it real for people just by telling it.”
The sudden temptation is to confide in her about everything. He needs her to trust him now. Maybe it’s time to start trusting a little himself.
“But it’s different for me, after the letter,” he persists. Okay, maybe he’ll never fully understand her story. But he doesn’t need it to be real. He only needs their emotions to be real. The rest will follow. Perhaps it’s the awkward way he steps forward, or the slight stumble in dropping down beside her, the steadying arm that accidentally lands in her lap, but something makes her take a chance.
“They came for my father less than a year after the revolution, when things were still in turmoil.” As the words begin, her mind seems to travel vast distances in space and time. “They took him away in the middle of the night. We were all terrified. I shall never forget that look he gave us as they marched him from the room. Like he was saying he didn’t care what dreadful things they might do to his body if they were going to separate him forever from the people he adored. And like he wanted to tell us not to worry, that his love would always stay with us.”
“Why did they take him? What had he done?”
Her delicate hands open in exasperation and nurse the sides of her face. “You didn’t need to have done anything. Kurds are an ethnic minority in Iran. They’re Muslim, but, well, separatist. They were seen as a threat. And when my father converted to Christianity and married my mother it just made him even more of a target. Mother believed that one of his own people had betrayed him. My grandfather insisted that wasn’t true. He said the government just wanted our assets. They’d accused us of spying for the Americans because father had worked… Ugh, it’s too complicated, Alex. Sorry, but I think we ought to go.”
Again dodging, this time with needless detail. “Where did they take him? Did you see him again?”
Gulnaz is up on her feet now, waiting on the path, but she steps back. “To a prison in Tehran.” She sits again and begins to explore the memory. “A revolutionary guard came to see us a week later. We thought he might have news, that it had all been a big mistake, but all he did was taunt us. He said we were now a family of just two.”
“Jesus, what a bastard. What did your grandfather say?”
“He wasn’t there. They were after him too. He was already in hiding by then.”
The Falklands story had been hard enough to get his head around. All those years when their father was away at sea for months on end the twins had imagined him coasting majestically into foreign ports with his crew lined up in salute along the deck. They’d acted it out time and again: him adjusting his tie, positioning his beret and striding ceremoniously down the gangplank to be encircled by crowds of adoring natives. Or he was commanding a gunship engaged in glorious battle with Russians and Germans, blasting their little backsides back to where they belonged. And in all these weeks he’s known Gulnaz, he’s imagined her as a child of the desert, eating wondrous fruits and sweets and nuts under an endless sun, happy with her beautiful paintings and intricate carpets, maybe a Persian cat or two, everyone talking in strange, foreign tongues and smoking on hooker pipes. But what she is telling him now comes less from another country, more from another planet. Prisons, revolutions, government conspiracies, ethnic minorities, people in hiding? He has no frame of reference for any of it.
“And you never saw your father again?”
“No. Never any official word.”
“So he could be alive.”
She looks defeated. “There’s no way you can grieve when you don’t see the body. I mean, when do you stop hoping? When do you stop snatching glimpses in a crowded street? When will I hear a knock at the door without my heart leaping, convinced for a fraction of a second that he’s come home? Yes, he might be alive. Nearly thirty years in a place like Evin prison, I don’t know what would be left of him. Or maybe they shot him on the very first day.”
“And your mother?”
This time Gulnaz doesn’t hesitate to answer. “The war had begun by then and we’d moved down to Tehran in the hope of seeing my father.”
“The war?”
“We were at war with Iraq. They’d started bombing the cities every day. Not blanket bombing, but enough to put everyone in a panic. I remember we had the radio on the whole time because they broadcast the sirens. Otherwise, where we lived you couldn’t hear them. We were lucky to have a cellar. Many people didn’t. We would just sit down there in the dark and wait. To be honest, I was more afraid of the flying cockroaches than the planes in the sky…”
In the same way that his own memories keep erupting into life, hers burst out at this point in a jangling of bells. For a moment they both sit wide-eyed, not quite believing that imagination has crossed over into reality. Instinct, reflex, training, whatever it is, a second later Gulnaz has shot up and assumed control. The care home’s fire alarm has gone off. There’s no drill scheduled for today. A genuine emergency. It’s everybody out… as fast as you can… nearest fire exit… no stopping for belongings… be sure to gather in the car park for a head count.
“We must get back at once,” she demands. “They don’t know we’re here. They might think we’re trapped inside.”
Chaos and confusion reign for the best part of an hour. And all because of an unsupervised frying pan – or a clogged toaster – or a sneaky drag on a cigarette in a non-smoking area, depending on who’s touting the opinion. Gulnaz could have walked with him to his room at the all-clear and continued her story. But she busies herself instead with other residents. Alex assumes that it’s deliberate.
In her absence, he does his best to imagine around the things she’d told him. A father in some infamous prison with nothing but a hard mattress and a bucket, being dragged out for interrogation and torture, thrown into solitary confinement. A grandfather skulking around in some cave on a mountainside with a pair of binoculars and an AK47 slung over his shoulder. A city in panic, houses rocked by explosions, people blown to pieces on the street or buried alive beneath chunks of concrete. But Gulnaz was right. None of this made her story any more real. This is stock media footage he’s calling up; Hollywood fictions one moment, news clips sterilised for easy consumption the next. No way to relate to the story, not being there, not breathing it with her. And yet the way she’d told it, just the look in her face, hadn’t it made Gulnaz herself so much more adorable?
Just like she had said; it was not strength that invited in love, but vulnerability.