Time-travel

About a hundred years ago, an Iraqi sheikh had a quarrel with his sons. As an envoy for the Ottoman government, he believed Turkey could bring civilization and stability to the Arab world, but when the Turks lost the war, he left the country, only to be seen once in the streets of Damascus, where he walked away from his family and was never heard of again.

At around the same time, thousands of miles away in a small village in Northern Bohemia, a hat-maker baptised his first son. Thirty years later, the mother of this child buried her husband in Vienna and, taking the advice of her doctor who suggested she move to the mountains where the climate would be more beneficial for her health, she packed her bags and left to South America, where three of her children were already living with families of their own.

A civil service worker stationed in Cardiff, Wales, was huddling in a bomb shelter with his family during a German air raid. Several times they thought they heard the bombers approaching the city, but it turned out to be the loud purring of their cat Jimmy. Their younger daughter later met an Iraqi musician studying in London, got married and left Europe. Her parents were sure she had been sold to the slave market.

A mother in Hamburg was always waiting for her husband to come back from sea. The moments when she stood on the docks of the harbor, waiting for the first glimpse of his ship returning from faraway places, were moments she would talk about years later as a great-grandmother. In 1955, her 19-year old daughter wanted to see some of the world and persuaded her parents to let her travel on her father’s ship to a small South American country called Ecuador. She never came back.

A dark-haired girl was staring at the dark desert outside the night bus between Baghdad and Damascus like she did every summer on this 16-hour trip, and far away in Quito two brothers fell into a container of cows’entrails in the meat factory their European ancestors had built. Years later, these two people found themselves in the Soviet Union, living in an apartment where the porcelain toilet seat was the most beautiful object in their home, and somewhere far away an already grown-up woman opened her atlas to find a country she had heard was covered with trees and snow, a country called Finland.

My family’s story has always been a story about people saying good-bye. It’s about queuing for hours for an international phone call, children not knowing who their uncles and aunts are and countless trips to the airport to see loved ones off. Times have changed and telegrams have become emails, trips which used to take weeks can now be made in a single day and generations can even communicate with each other through webcams, but the good-byes are still the same as they were years ago.

But there is more to the story than the farewells. There are letters arriving after their long trips with pictures and birthday cards. There are brave people who aren’t afraid to plunge into unknown worlds. Best of all, there are airplanes bringing sons, daughters and grand-children back home for the first time in eight years. And there is that unspoken feeling that no matter how far people live from each other, there is always something that connects them: the stories which are being passed on to the next generation.

This post is dedicated to my ancestors.