A rainy walk beneath sand mountains | True Blue #2

He always walks fast. Faster than me and my mom and my siblings, and then he complains about having to wait for us. Not today though. It’s just the two of us and the rain.

I think he was happy when I asked him whether he was okay with me writing down the stories he tells me. It’s hard to tell though, because it’s raining and we both have our hoods up and are huddled under the same umbrella. He said he’d re-tell them though, anything that helps me record them all, so I’ll take that as appreciation.

We walk in silence for a while. I love our silence. It’s so peaceful, being silent with dad. And so natural and calm whenever we start talking in between the silence.

As we walk I, of course, make my usual joke. My parents hear it a lot over the winter months, and on a rainy walk like this it’s almost mandatory, tradition. A few years ago I definitely wasn’t joking though whenever I asked why they chose this grey rainy place to live instead of literally any other place in the world. I am joking now. At least I think I am. The older I get, the more I appreciate Switzerland. And the more I understand why my mom wanted to stay where she grew up, where she works, where she knows people. And the more I understand why my dad says he couldn’t go back to Egypt permanently, that he’s changed, has built a life, has gotten used to being here.

So, we’re walking through the rainy gray streets of Switzerland as he starts talking and I know now, can imagine now, what a few years ago I could not have, when he tells me about his childhood. Because now, I’ve been to the ruins, I’ve seen what is left of the village he grew up in. I know that as a little girl we went to visit it once before but I couldn’t remember that, of course. Well, I remember now, and I can see it as I’m sure he does, when he tells me about it.

I’m sure he sees it much more clearly and colorfully, much more alive than I do.

But I feel it, the sand and the mountains, the sun and the silence. Oh, the silence. Indescribable all-consuming silence.

Never rain.

He remembers the shelter of childhood, the magic, the wonder, and he remembers how he was shocked out of it. The awful year after his mother died.

When I ask him what would be the most important part of his biography, to him it’s his mother and her death. He carries it around, still, he always will. Permanently affected, never the same.

But he also is very particular about me catching the awe of his childhood, the innocent freedom, the fun and the pureness of life in his village.

He says he doesn’t remember ever buying toys. All his toys were self-made out of wire and metal. He tells me about pre-school which consisted of learning souras by heart and new letters of the alphabet. Once in school, he’d ask his older sisters for help because his parents couldn’t read. They had a family goat, for milk, and he laughs as he says that they were always either searching for the goat or for his brother.

His brother has down syndrome.

When my dad reached fourth grade, that’s when his mother died. He was nine. People didn’t treat him the same after, treated him like he like he was made of glass. He hated that.

You know, I saw a video recently of kids being asked what they would wish for if they could have anything in the world. And they are all smiling; the American kids saying money, billions and billions of dollars, and a Lamborghini; the Palestinian kids saying they want their father back to how he was before and their brother back alive to play with. And it’s the smiles that get you, the smiles that really drive the message home.

He starts telling me about his sisters then. He has seven of them.

He doesn’t remember ever living with his oldest sister because she had already married and moved out when he was a baby. She is ten years older than him. She had her first son when she was fourteen. He remembers that she was already a mother while she was still playing in the street with the neighborhood kids.

Are you shocked? Was I when he told me this?

You knew this ‘used to happen’. ‘Saman’, ‘frühener’, ‘a while ago’, and you forget. You forget that my Swiss grandmother didn’t get to vote till she was in her thirties. You forget that my Egyptian grandmother could, since she was a girl in fact, but the only thing she can write is her own name, in the insecure shaky handwriting of analphabets. You forget that my dad grew up without tap water or toilets that flush, that he was studying with a candle.

You forget that ‘a while ago’ means fifty years ago, seventy years. You forget that ‘used to happen’ means that there are women alive who were child brides. You forget ‘things like this’ are still happening now. Maybe not in Egypt, maybe not in Switzerland. But the world is big and just because you have been lucky enough not to directly experience certain horrors that others go through doesn’t mean that they don’t happen.

My dad says that life was simpler back then, but it was also tougher.

His youngest sister lived with their grandmother for the first five years of her life. She was pampered and got everything she wanted and when she returned to them to live with a family of many kids, she felt confused and run over, and he thinks it still affects her. That those years of trying to cope and find her place are the reason she still is so shy now, never talks much. As a kid she was always my favorite aunt, actually. So kind. Always a smile for you, a compliment. Always made the best food too, especially my favorite. And her daughter, my cousin, is almost exactly my age. There are photos of us as babies, born a few weeks apart.

A few weeks ago, the last time I saw her, she crocheted me a little white handbag with a red butterfly on it that is so precious to me.

We meet my Grandma on our walk. The Swiss one, my mother’s mother. We laugh as she comes our way and jokes how after a whole day of rain we, too, made it out of the house despite it. We walk with her the rest of the way, capes closely wrapped around us, curtains of rain coming down, and talk about the pullover that I’ve started to knit under her instruction.

For as long as I can remember she’d always be knitting. Right now, she is working on a pair of her little baby shoes that I absolutely adore. She taught me to sew and alter my own clothes a few years ago. Since I moved out I don’t see her that often anymore, which is why I decided to relearn to knit. I told her it’d help with my anxiety, and so we looked for a pattern guide and wool.

I tell her about the progress I made. Not much, since we only just started knitting it yesterday. My dad says that you can’t tell it’s a pullover yet. I laugh because it’s true. But it’s so soft, and it’s purple!

My father’s oldest sister used to sew clothes for me and my siblings, too. I remember this one costume in particular that she tailor made for me for Fasnacht, carnival, when I was nine and wanted to go as a clown. She has nine children and lives in a tiny house on the ground floor, with two bedrooms that they all shared, at the very outskirts of town, almost in the desert. Close to the ghost town in the Sahara where they grew up.

Did you know that ‘Sahara’ is Arabic for desert? So when people say the Sahara desert, they are actually saying the desert desert.