We leave the House of Cyclamens early, five probably, up at four thirty, cool still, blinking in the half darkness, stumbling into the open-back lorry, out into the morning.
I don’t remember the name of where we go, half an hour or so away, only that in hilly country it’s a high point, commanding. We climb out taking only our small backpacks. Below, steep slopes fall away through folded hillsides of thorns and rock. The lorry leaves us, throwing up dust from the dry stones. We’ll be reunited much later, miles and hours later.
The day’s there sharp but hazy, in bits as everyone who was there, the horizon, the sky, the sun, rising. The feel of it’s there, sharper for the memory. The names. Some of the names.
We start from the high point. Years later I remember and laugh, reading what a famous author who knew it all well wrote, mockingly:
‘… the breathless climbing up to a good high mountain, the looking for half an hour over a marvellous and historically significant landscape then climbing down again. Anything less than two far mountains and a wide horizon, we wouldn’t call nature.’ Mocking himself, almost. But not.
Except that they weren’t mountains, or not where I come from. Small hills, if that.
Why that day? I don’t know. A day when things fuse and become one and become clear, I don’t know why. Why does one day stay when so many others don’t? The stones perhaps, the remnants of walls, the questions.
Knowing has become interesting to me. Not knowledge which is always interesting, or sometimes at least, but what’s known when and how, what responsibility we bear for not knowing, even though we couldn’t have known. Are we still guilty?
Guilt and absolution. These are the new realities. The realities change and change and change and now, they’re this.
Not just one day. There are others, a few. There must be reasons to remember them and there are but they don’t make sense unless you believe in lines, thread from one thing to another.
We set off, running, bounding from boulder to boulder, exhilarated, thorns catching at our bare legs. I’m proud that I can keep up and keep ahead. The others are used to this kind of thing.
‘A wide horizon.’ Still there, the wide horizon, the hot blue sky. What doesn’t change. There would have been birds in that sky but I didn’t notice.
I don’t know why we run, we just do, like creatures flying from a newly opened cage. There are a couple of older people with us but they don’t tell us to do anything and I just do the same as everyone else.
There seem, on this day, to be no boundaries, just land falling before our feet, and air and sky. Another way in which I’m wrong.
I think of it all now as an absence. Absences can linger, or the knowledge of an absence. It’s only later that we mourn what we didn’t know.
There were birds I didn’t see and didn’t know. Now I wonder what they would have been, Honey buzzards and hawks, francolins and warblers, flights of cranes.
