duminică, 25 ianuarie 2009

The beginning

This is the saddest story I have ever heard. And I’ve had my fair share of dramas in the ten years as a journalist in London. I am looking at David’s shaking hands, trying to find the right thing to say. There’s nothing. Here I am standing in front of this broken man, a man who chose me to tell his story to the world. His grey eyes are empty and sunken deep into his skull. He looks diminished, almost a puppet under the worn dark blue covers. There is nothing between us, but a heavy silence pressing hard against my chest.

‘Say something,’ I urge myself, looking around the spartan-furnished room, as if help would come from the small corner brown table, or maybe from somewhere underneath it. But what is there to tell a man who saw his loved ones die? What can you tell a man who witnessed his twelve-year old daughter being raped and burned alive? How can you comfort a man whose toddler son and wife had their limbs cut off while he was watching helpless strapped to a pillar?

For the hundredth time, I open my mouth and try to speak. To comfort him and give him reassurance that his story won’t die, buried among the pages of a tabloid paper, as it happens with most of its kind today. But the words won’t come out. I gasp for air, I try to speak again. After a while, I give up. I just sit there, next to his bed, patting his hand and waiting and wondering at how fast a man who had it all lost everything to fate.

My head is spinning with thoughts without rhyme or reason. They come galloping like white ghosts, one after the other. Thoughts of blood and death from another lifetime, of the smell of burned flash and desperate screams of pain and agony.

I look at the brown file on the steel night stand. There, between the covers are pictures of his assassinated family. Sheila, his wife, has a bullet wound in the middle of her forehead. His daughter, Amy, her hair burned and jaw broken. And Daniel stares sadly into nothingness…

vineri, 16 ianuarie 2009

An ending

I was holding his body, feeling the life slip out of him. I knew he was finally at peace. ‘Can you hear them Lara? They are calling me. They are…,’ David’s face was twisted in a broken smile. He reached out with a trembling hand, somewhere towards the horizons as if caressing a beloved face.

‘I can see them, Lara. Oh, they are so beautiful. Sheila, my beautiful Sheila…’

Tears were running down my cheeks, staining his face. But he didn’t feel them. He was already far, far from me. I wanted to tell him to hang on, but I knew his time had come. He had stuck around enough to see his children’s murderers behind bars. For a while I tricked myself into believing that maybe, just maybe, life would come back into his steel-grey eyes.

For all these months spent besides him, I had come to know David well and cherish his presence like a child cherishes the memory of his first snow. His tragedy helped me face my own demons, my own painful past. Unlike my own, his family’s murderers had been found and brought to trial. But being part of David’s journey to salvation brought back my inner peace.

Looking down at his face, my stomach churned at the thought of losing him. Now he was looking into my eyes smiling. The first smile I’d ever seen on his face. He touched my cheek and wiped away my tears. ‘Don’t cry baby girl. Go on, be happy. I’ll be watching over you from up there, just like you’ve been doing all this time for me.’

I felt his body stiffen. He breathed in one more time and whispered ,‘You are beautiful’.

I grasped for air to block the tears from choking me. I smiled and held him closer. Lying there, on the cold ground, I whispered words of comfort and witnessed the night end. Overhead, without any fuss stars were going out.