- Statement -
We played with grandmother, my sister and I. Sometimes, when the sound of a low-flying airplane was heard above our roof, grandmother would turn her face up and shout: “ The Russians are coming! ” The playing stopped for a moment and I realized that her childhood was much different from ours. Grandmother, you used to laugh until you couldn’t stand up straight but you couldn’t sleep at night.
I remember the smell of your skin when you played with us. It was a smell of older people, a sweet smell of talc powder from the bottle in your bathroom cabinet. Your hands were cold but your body was warm and soft. I moved far away after you died grandma and for years I surrounded myself by a collective fear. I went places where people were afraid for tangible reasons. It was a different kind of fear, a real and relatable one. At home I never felt any reason to be fearful and I wondered why you did.
On my travels for work people ask me all sorts of questions about fear. Then sometimes I think of you lying awake at night in your bedroom with the dark red wallpaper and the framed pictures of royal families, and I think of us playing on a Saturday morning and I think of you being afraid of an invisible enemy and how me and my sister can’t understand and I think it must be your childhood. I went home a while ago and saw that those kinds of headlines had come back again and it made me think of you. So it came back, the fear, your fear. And so, maybe you were right after all, I thought.